


Вена Кава

by voicedimplosives



Series: The Critterverse [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Cryptozoology, F/M, Natasha Feels, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-12-11
Packaged: 2019-02-01 00:18:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 32,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12693153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voicedimplosives/pseuds/voicedimplosives
Summary: The venae cavae (from the Latin for "hollow veins", singular "vena cava") are two large veins that return deoxygenated blood from the body into the heart.If you asked Natasha about the human heart, she'd smile coyly and tell you she doesn't know much about that.The truth? Well, you know what they say. It's stranger than fiction.





	1. aorta

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This is a sequel. The previous story is [Fearsome Critters and Where (Not) to Find Them](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12247896/chapters/27829350), a different take on how the Avengers might have come together, focusing on Darcy Lewis and Bucky Barnes' relationship. Also, cryptozoology and the takedown of Shieldra. It's a romp!
> 
> This one focuses more on Natasha Romanov trying to sort out her life, post-SHIELD files leak before and then mostly after the Battle of Manhattan. But... there's still a lot going on. Including a handful of cryptids. It's complicated. I understand if that's not your bag and I will feel no offense if you check out. But if you have the time and wouldn't mind trying it out, that would be supremely awesome...
> 
> Okay. Onto the fiction! Or truth! Or whatever!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”
> 
> ######  _The Brothers Karamazov_ , Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#### Stark Tower, New York City

The low vibration of Natasha's phone in her pocket, notifying her of an alarm that she'd set up in a rare moment of sentimentality months ago, pulled her focus from Nick's rundown on the elusive Bruce Banner. She glanced across the table to see that Steve Rogers, his enhanced hearing having allowed him to catch the noise, was staring at her curiously. She shook her head subtly, pulling her lips down then wrinkling her nose in dismissal, and turned back to Nick. His eyes flickered between the two of them, catching the interaction, and he peered to his right at Tony Stark, who was apparently absorbed with something on his phone. Tony had insisted on being privy to the meeting, despite the fact that he'd had access to SHIELD's file on Banner for weeks and that this was mostly a tactical discussion for an operation that would not involve him. 

Still, the man owned the building. He was single-handedly funding the Avengers initiative, much of the restoration of SHIELD after the discovery of Hydra's infiltration and its ensuing collapse, and this mission. If he wanted to sit at the table pretending he wasn't interested in the proceedings, he was well within his rights.

Natasha sighed, and peered down at her watch. It was a gift from Laura, given during her stay at the Barton farm for the last week. She had meant to leave for India immediately after their skirmish in Oregon with the Rumlow-led STRIKE team, but Nick had told her to wait a few weeks while they put together a support team for her. It had been a nice excuse to re-ingratiate herself with Stark, and check in on Clint a few times to monitor his recovery.

She hadn't had the heart to tell Laura that giving early birthday gifts was considered extremely bad luck back in her motherland, so she had instead accepted the watch, thanking the thoughtful woman and donning it right there and then in her homey, rustic kitchen. It was delicate but practical, with a thin black leather band and black face. The gold crown, case and hands gleamed in the conference room's warm yellow lighting. No harsh neon ceiling lights or drop ceilings for Tony Stark, the entire building in general and the Avengers' workspaces in particular flourished with the tasteful, thoughtful touch of Pepper Potts.

The hands both rested at twelve. It was exactly noon, and remembering the date, Natasha realized that meant it was eight pm Moscow Standard Time. Eight pm on November twenty-second. She knew the reason for the alarm, what she had intended to remind herself. Then she pushed the thought aside, because Nick was asking her a question.

“Yes, ten agents for backup should be enough,” she answered carefully. ”If you can spare them. But when I find Banner, I want to speak to him alone first. I think I can talk him into joining us without using force.” There was an errant, stubborn longing for Clint's steady hand on this mission that nagged at her, but Natsha knew that pulling him out of his undergoing rehabilitation for the injuries he'd sustained in Oregon would do him more harm than it would her good.

“Right, _talk_ ,” Tony said, glancing up from his phone and smirking. He looked smug, and Natasha felt a brief flare of indignation at what he was implying before she settled herself and fixed him with a cool, blank stare. He smiled sheepishly. “By which I mean... well, you're a persuasive woman, Romanoff. Got me on-board, didn't you?”

Steve rolled his eyes. “And here I was thinking you joined us because you wanted to do the right thing, Tony,” he chided, his voice warm with good-humored chagrin.

Chortling softly, Tony replied, “Hey, don't put me in a box, Rogers. I'm a complex man.”

“ _Anyway_ ,” Nick interjected, “Romanoff, after you've brought in Banner, the leave you requested has been approved. What are you planning to do with it?”

Natasha sobered, looked around the table warily. There was the ever-present series of equations, the weighing of motives, the consideration for cause and effect. After a weighty pause, she said simply, “I'm going home.”

Steve's gaze turned sympathetic and he nodded understandingly. Tony looked up from his phone once more and he had a funny, alarmed expression on his face, as though he was realizing only now, for the first time, that Natasha was more than just a seductress or spy.

“Fair enough,” Nick said. “Do you think you'll be able to establish a new cover?”

“I hope so,” she answered, “Most of the world knows my face, who I am, what I've done. But I have a feeling if I ask Mother Russia to take me back, she will.”

“Wait a minute, are you defecting from SHIELD and America?” Tony demanded.

“Not defecting, exactly. Just... re-establishing myself in a way that might be useful, down the road,” Natasha murmured.

A dissatisfied hmmph was the only response she got, but Nick endorsed the decision with a quick nod and Steve's faint, tender smile negated Tony's skepticism. Nick rose from the table, reminding her the Quinjet would be leaving from the tower's helipad at zero six hundred the next morning before strutting out of the room; Tony followed on his heels, muttering something about fulfilling his sworn duty to disrupt the shareholders' quarterly meeting.

Natasha was gathering the few relevant photos that had been passed around during the meeting, when she felt Steve's hand on her arm. “Happy birthday, Natasha,” he said softly. His expression was so open, so well-meaning, and the thoughtfulness of it struck at her. She sighed.

“You're not supposed to know that, Steve,” she answered. “No one is.”

Steve gazed over at her, his hand coming up to rub his chin as he gave her his consideration. “I heard your alarm go off, on your phone. That's what it was for, wasn't it? And... I think I am supposed to know those things. As your commanding officer.”

Photos gathered, she turned to him, offering a tight smile. “Okay then, Cap. Thanks.” She felt a small tug of guilt for the terse nature of her reply as she stood and headed for the door, but she also felt a strange defensiveness for this one small, secret fact of her identity. Still, he hadn't meant anything by it, her better nature argued. She turned back at the door, to see Steve was still seated, staring thoughtfully out the rain-flecked windows at the gloomy sky, the wet city below.

“Steve,” she said. “I don't care how you know that and I don't mind you knowing, or snooping, if you feel you need to. Just... keep that information to yourself? It's one of the few things that wasn't in my file. I told SHIELD my birthday was September eighth. That's just my name day, though. My birthday... I don't have many things left, that are truly mine alone. That haven't been... exposed.”

Steve turned in the rolling chair, nodding once again with understanding. “Of course, Natasha. My lips are sealed. And... good luck, with Banner.” She smiled appreciatively, then withdrew from the conference room, leaving Steve to his thoughts. She strode down the hall, lost in her own.

҉

Several stories down from the conference room, Sharon was sitting with her feet up on the burnished steel desk on one side of the cubicle, Darcy bent over a massive tome on the other. Sharon was casually, leisurely cleaning a firearm, one of a half dozen that she'd laid out neatly on the desk beside her. She looked up when Natasha approached the opening of the cubicle and leaned against the eye-height dividing wall that surrounded the rest of it.

“Hey, Romanoff,” she said, a friendly grin lighting up her face. “Heading out?”

“Tomorrow morning,” Natasha answered, then tilted her head at Darcy, who had not looked up from the page of fine print she was pouring over. “Hard at work?”

She got no answer, and looked back to Sharon, arching an eyebrow.

“Today we're studying field operation emergency protocol,” Sharon supplied, her grin deepening into something slightly devious. “Lewis had some complaints about the physical training regiment, so I decided to give her... _a break_.” Her tone had a sardonic twist to it, and at the mention of her name, Darcy lifted her head.

Her eyes were slightly bloodshot from strain of reading the tiny print, even in Stark's well-lit offices, and she looked exhausted. “Help me Obi-Wan Natasha, you're my only hope,” she groaned.

“Sorry, milaya. But if you thought you would get a break in your training just because I have a mission... well, Sharon's even more of a hardass than I am,” she joked, in a low, conspiratorial tone.

“At least you let me sit on the common room couch when I have to study this thing,” Darcy grumbled, shoving the training manual away from herself.

“I heard that, Lewis,” Sharon answered, her grin belying any anger she might have felt at the slightly insubordinate tone Darcy was taking. “And we can move to the common room once you tell me, step-by-step, the exact procedure for any hostage situation on a field op. And then run five miles.”

“This is because I said I didn't want to start five am Krav Maga lessons, isn't it? I just... isn't having a tazer and learning to fire a gun enough? And why do I have to be awake at such a ridiculous hour? Five am is for sleep and drunk sex, that's all.”

Natasha smirked. “No, she's right Darcy. You need to be able to handle yourself in hand-to-hand combat, at least enough to defend yourself. Listen to everything Agent 13 has to teach you and do exactly what she says while I'm gone. No slacking, I mean it. If she's happy with your training by the time I get back, we'll do a girl's night.” Sharon beamed approvingly at the idea, waggling her eyebrows at Darcy.

“Margaritas?” Darcy asked hopefully. “Nobody makes them as good as you do.”

“As many as you can handle,” Natasha promised, waving goodbye to the women. She could hear Darcy whooping excitedly and Sharon's chuckle behind her as she made for the elevator, before companionable silence settled back over the cubicle.

҉

Hours later, Natasha lay wide awake in bed. It was past midnight, and still she could not sleep. Every time she closed her eyes it was the same. Her home, the small flat in Stalingrad where she'd spent the first six years of her life. Her father's pockmarked, care-worn face. Her mother's bright green eyes, the light sparkling in them as she laughed at the silly stories he'd invent to amuse his little girl.

The last time she'd seen them... the shocking emptiness of it still sometimes pulled at her, like a lead weight sunk to the bottom of her stomach.

Natasha threw the sheets back, and rolled over to switch on the bedside lamp. She checked the watch, resting on the nightstand. Two fifteen. Natasha sighed, and pushed herself into a seated position, wrapping her arms around her bent knees.

There was no point in continuing to try for sleep; she needed to exhaust herself physically. The practical choice would be to train, perhaps try out battle simulations using some of the tech Stark had in the building, but there was that longing flaring up once again for something familiar, for steadiness. She slipped out of bed and pulled on a soft, comfortable pair of spandex pants and a loose t-shirt, then chucked her short crimson hair up into a messy bun. Disregarding shoes, Natasha padded out the door of her suite and down the carpeted hall, calling the elevator. Inside, she pressed the button for floor sixty-eight. Jarvis's clipped British voice asked in a friendly, soft tone, “Everything alright, Agent Romanoff?”

“No rest for the wicked, Jarvis,” she sighed, leaning back against the elevator wall. When the doors opened, she turned in the direction of the gym. Flipping on the lights inside, she found it empty, as she'd hoped it would be. Perfect. She moved past the many complex machines and equipment in the room, to the floor-to-ceiling mirror on the far wall.

Natasha started slow. It'd been a while, she wasn't as limber as she'd once been and she was out of practice. So first she stretched, sitting on the mat and studying her form critically. After her limbs began to warm up, her muscles gently eased into alertness, Natasha stood again. She glanced around the room. There was no barre, this room not having been built with a ballerina's needs in mind. Her eyes lit on a chair sitting against a wall. It would have to do.

She began with something simple, moving through the positions. 

First, heels touching, arches exposed and toes laid so that her feet made one continuous line parallel to the mirror in front of her. Taut belly pulled in, even breathing. Port du bras, leaning languidly forward, then back. Demi plié, a small bend at the knees and then up again. 

Adagio, everything flowing smoothly and slowly. Calm and control.

Second, her right foot sliding out so that her legs were spread slightly, her arms extended like a mockery of an offered embrace. Port du bras, demi plié. 

Third and fourth, feet shuffling for dominance, one arm raised and the other extended, then one curled gracefully in towards her body and the other raised high. 

Fifth, always her favorite because of its demand for balance and coordination, feet laid alongside one another but pointing in opposite directions, her knees pulling in to make the lines of her toned legs correct. Arms raised, focus on the placement of her fingers, extended towards each other, almost touching but not quite. Graceful, soft fingers curved slightly. 

Allongé, every limb being pushed to its limit. She breathed into the burn, letting the flow of memories rush up and drain away. Just physical sensation, no thinking required.

One hand on the chair, she practiced en tendu, one strong leg stretched straight, presented in front of her, then swung to the side, then finally tapping the mat behind her. She switched to the other side. Perfect command of every muscle, presenting the illusion of melting, liquid grace. Extensions, using the chairback. Arms pulled over her outstretched leg, a smooth arc to her back as she tapped her toe, then exchanged legs.

The arabesque, first then second then third. Leg raised to her hip's height behind her. Clean lines. Straight arms, pulling her forward, keeping her steady. She began a series of pirouettes, using one of the weight machines as her point of focus in the mirror each time she came to a rest, then propelled herself into the next spin. A stern woman's voice, Madame B. counting out the steps in a large, airy room. A squadron of dead-eyed girls whirling flawlessly, in unison and on command. A heavy gun resting in her palm, Madame B.'s red lips giving commands her mind could not fully comprehend. The absence of thought, a conscience howling wildly from somewhere deep inside, the need to obey taking over as her finger tightened on the trigger.

The past rushed in once again, refusing to be shaken off, and the room came to a rest before her eyes as she stepped out of the pirouette. She was breathing heavily, from the physical demand and the mental strain, and collapsed somewhat gracelessly into the chair. She glared at herself in the mirror, frustrated from having succumbed to the memories, and that's when the gleam of his vibranium arm caught her attention.

Bucky was standing just inside the doorway, watching her through the mirror cautiously. Their eyes met, but he said nothing. Flushed, sweating ever so slightly, she turned in her chair to face him. He too was clad in comfortable athletic gear, a pair of sweats slung low on his hips and one of Darcy's oversized tourist tees, this one sporting a silhouette of Sasquatch with the phrase 'Hide and Seek Champion' written underneath, stretched tight across his chest. His hair was pulled back to the nape of his neck, and his face was clean-shaven, so unlike how it had been when they'd dropped off him and Darcy in that small town in northern California after taking out STRIKE.

“Barnes,” she called out in greeting. He moved into the room, head hung abashedly, his long stride graceful and considered. He stopped at a nearby weight bench, and lowered himself onto it.

“Sorry,” he began, eyes roaming away from her, over the equipment. “I, uh... couldn't sleep. This therapy thing I've been doing with the headshrinker Steve found, it's... stirred up a lotta old memories.”

Natasha snorted delicately. “I know something about that. Sam Wilson, that's your counselor, right? Do you like him? Is it helping?”

Bucky shrugged, looking down at his clenched bionic fist. “Yes and no. I think we're making progress on my programming. Wilson wants to talk about feelings though. I'm not so good at that.”

“Except with Darcy,” Natasha reminded him. 

He smiled softly, his hand unclenching, then nodded. “She's far too easy on me. I remember you dancing, y'know. Back when... before. I saw you girls when you were practicing, once. They wanted me to have a full idea of your education, before I started working with you. You're still pretty good at it. Dancin'.”

“I'm out of practice.” She shook her head, dismissing the compliment. “But it feels good.”

“I used to box,” Bucky offered. “Been so long since I fought clean like that, learned so many dirty tricks in between then and now, well... you know. Doing what we do. But I think it'd probably still feel good, to do it.”

“I imagine it would. You could...” She paused, unsure of how the suggestion would be received. “Tony likes to box, sometimes. You could, I don't know, ask him to spar with you.”

“You think that's a good idea?” He was staring at her intently, brows drawn together and face clouded with doubt.

“Using physical aggression to work out some of your issues in a non-lethal manner? Honestly, in any normal situation, with people who could just sit down and communicate with each other, I'd say no. But for you two... maybe.” She smirked at him and he grimaced in return, then turned to consider their reflections in the mirrored wall.

“Do _you_ hate me?” he asked, seemingly out of the blue. Her eyes narrowed in confusion, so he continued. “I'd understand if you did. It's just... you were so young, Natasha. I remember. You were... still a girl, when I trained you. I coulda... I coulda saved you, then. Maybe you would've had a chance. I think about it. 'Bout how I could've found someplace safe for you to hide, gotten you out of the USSR. I don't know why I couldn't break their hold on me then. I just... I wish it had been different, for you.”

She bit the inside of her cheek as she considered his words. “Darcy surprised you, that's what helped you break free. I didn't, because I was doing exactly what they told me to do. It was sad, maybe, but not surprising for you. And no, Barnes... I couldn't hate you anymore than I could myself. We were used.”

“Really? You don't hate yourself? Not ever? I do, sometimes,” he confessed.

She sighed. “I understand, although I don't think you should. You were being controlled. I was manipulated from the time I was a child. In a sense, I suppose I do sometimes hate myself, even though I _know_ I was used. I mean to say... I know what regret tastes like. But what good does it do, James? Would hating myself forever bring back the dead, would it unruin the lives we've tampered with, would it wipe clean the red from our ledgers? I doubt it. So... what? Kuda ni kin', vezde klin. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I can't say if being an agent of SHIELD, an Avenger, will make things right, but...”

“It's better than nothing,” he whispered, almost inaudibly. She nodded.

“I'm just trying to balance the scales. And you have someone who loves you, someone who believes in you. Someone whose life you make better by existing as the good man you are today. You're trying too. These things matter.”

“Yeah,” he said, rising and moving towards the free weights. “Still can't sleep though.” She stood, moving the chair back to the wall. “Hey, don't let me drive you away. You can keep dancing or whatever, if you want.” He looked at her, his natural arm bent towards his chest and a twenty-pound dumbbell in his hand.

She shook her head. “That's okay. I think I'm finished for tonight.” He shrugged, returning to his curls, and Natasha slipped away from the gym. She had a little less than three hours before she had to be on the helipad, ready to depart for India. She was going to get some sleep, whether her brain wanted to cooperate or not.

 

҉

After greeting her fellow agents and shoving her go-bag into the Quinjet's hold, Natasha worked out their flight schedule and curled up in one of the seats in the back, using the attached computer screen to review the details of Banner's case. She'd be taking the second flying shift, meaning she had most of the morning to study the scientist and figure out contingencies for how their little chat might go.

The man was undeniably impressive. Biochemics and radiophysics professor at Culver University, famous worldwide for the brilliant articles he'd published and talks he'd given on his many disciplines. Holder of seven doctorate degrees. Trained in Aikido. Knowledgeable in engineering and medicine, and fluent in Hindi and proficient in Bengali. Thus his ability to support himself over the last several years while living in Kolkata. And famous within SHIELD for his participation in the controversial Bio-Tech Force Enhancement Project, although that information was more or less public now.

 _And_ cute, Natasha admitted to herself, flipping through the surveillance team's photos of him from the last six months. He looked different from the earlier photos they had of him, shortly after his confrontation with the Abomination and General Ross. In his most recent photos, he looked... peaceful. Centered. Focused. Like a man who knew he was doing the right thing.

That's what her father's face had used to look like, when she was very small. Before the stressful days began. Ali, as his friends had called him, short for Alexei or Alexander, had been a scientist himself. Sometimes he'd gone by Pasha, a childhood nickname because he'd mispronounced his other nickname, Sasha. Russians and their nicknames, she mused, a faint smile curling her lips as she remembered her father's devotion to teaching his daughter as much about mechanics as her small minds could comprehend. It had often ended with her poor father taking Natasha, impatient with the complicated subject and yearning to be outside, for a walk through the nearby city park when their long-suffering mother grew tired of her whining and sent them away, so she could finish cooking dinner at the small stove in their kitchen in peace.

Alexander, Ali, Pasha... he'd been the man to go to if you needed something built or repaired in Stalingrad. He'd been a man of interest to so many people. That'd been where the trouble all started, really. Pasha Romanova had been too damn useful.

Natasha's nose twitched, a phantom scent of boiled chicken and cabbage wafting up from her past. She shook her head slightly, pushing the stray curl that had fallen down into her face back behind her ear. Memories, again. It was the birthday that was causing them, she was sure of it. Natasha counted the years. She was born in 1984, which meant she'd turned twenty-eight yesterday.

It was strange. She felt so much older than that, most days. She felt as though she'd been fighting and fucking and keeping secrets and selling secrets for decades now. But she remembered Pasha telling her, cigarette smoke escaping his mouth alongside his raspy voice, that math and science were not to be argued with. So. Twenty-eight.

That was the age Dreykov's daughter had been. Her first kill, made before her graduation ceremony from the Red Room. Madame B. had demanded it, had placed the gun in Natalia's hand and told her to do what must be done. She'd known the girl, Agrafena, from Stalingrad. They'd lived in the same neighborhood, and Natasha had remembered admiring her long black hair, flowing out from under her kerchief like the dark waters of the Volga, when she saw her in the street. She'd still pulled the trigger.

She cut the reminiscence short, turning her eyes back from their vacant inspection of the bulkhead to the screen in front of her. Enough, Alianovna, she scolded herself. No more sentiment.

The past was past, and just because she'd be returning to her country of birth soon enough, there was no need to let herself become consumed by hers. Not when there was so much riding on this mission, and the future.

҉

#### Kolkata, India

Natasha waited in the small hut on the outskirts of town patiently. She'd sent the girl to the house where Banner was working about an hour ago, so they should be there soon. She looked down at her long, loose skirt and flattering top. She'd considered going full tactical gear, because if she was being honest with herself, she was terrified of the creature. The thing that was a part of Bruce Banner, but also separate from him.

The Hulk.

She'd had time during the flight to review footage of his rampages, his effortless destruction of everything in his way, and she was left shaken. The man, she could handle. The beast?

She wasn't sure anyone could handle that.

So she figured, volk v ovech'yey shkurye. Be the wolf in sheep's clothing. She looked nice, she thought, adjusting the skirt and double checking the five firearms she'd stowed around the room. She looked gentle. She was ready for Bruce Banner. She was not going to think about Stalingrad, or Pasha, or Madame B.

She was the Black Widow, and this was what she did best.

҉

It'd been easier than she'd anticipated. His eyes had glowed ambitiously from the moment she uttered the words “gamma radiation”, and although he'd played a mean trick by pretending to get angry, testing her limits, he'd agreed in the end to come with her.

Then he'd asked her to let him return to his patient. She had, following along curiously, and had even assisted him while he attempted to alleviate the sick man's suffering. As they walked out of the man's simple house, he'd turned to her.

“Dinner?” he'd asked, his face nearly unreadable in its practiced blankness and the deep shadows of the unlit street.

“Yes,” she'd said, perhaps too eagerly. And so there they were, crouching on small plastic footstools in the doorway of a restaurant nestled in a busy alleyway, picking at the bitter mix of vegetables in their first course while they waited for the shukto stew and dal to arrive.

He smiled shyly, and she returned it.

“So, Bruce,” she began, her smile widening to show her perfectly white teeth. “Tell me, really, why Kolkata?”

“They need help, I can provide it,” he said plainly, giving her a slight lift of his shoulders as if to say, what choice is there?

“Do you miss your work, your colleagues?”

“I think...” Now it was he who eyed _her_ curiously. “I think, that part of my life may be over. As an academic. I can't pretend that I'm normal like that anymore.”

“And you can here?” she pressed.

He shifted his head to take in the activity of the narrow, shadowy lane, even at this late hour full of people making their way through the city on foot, by rickshaw, by bicycle, by dusty motorbikes. “There's danger here. For them. I, er, I do have control over it, now. Mostly. But still. What do you think, Agent Romanoff? Should I completely isolate myself, help no one and let the rest of my life pass me by? How many people is an acceptable amount to endanger?”

She blinked, her smile faltering. “I don't know, Bruce,” she murmured. This was getting too serious, too intimate. Bruce wasn't her mark, there was no point to her pushing him like this. He was supposed to be her colleague. She decided to shift the conversation towards something lighter. “You know... I have an associate at SHIELD. She's very interested in, well, supernatural creatures. Or... unnatural, maybe? She calls them cryptids. Have you heard of any around here?”

Bruce's grin turned wide and open at that. “Cryptids? Sure, there are stories. The Buru, a giant lizard up in the mountains, the Mande Barung or if you cross over into Nepal, the Yeti. Lots of mountain creatures, in fact.”

“Ever seen anything?”

“Well, I haven't left the city much recently. When I was making my way here through Pakistan, some of the English-speaking locals told me about the Barmanu, which is their Bigfoot. And about the Kabandha, which, frankly, I was very confused by. It's headless, but it has one huge eye in its, uh, torso? Anyway, its appearances go all the way back to a few ancient Hindu epics. Make of that what you will.”

“But did _you_ see anything?” Natasha asked.

Chuckling, Bruce admitted, “Not a thing. Heard some weird noises up in the mountains, but I figured it could've just as easily have been the wind as some wild mountain primate, or a cyclops, or what have you. But, I have a more pressing question for you Agent Romanoff... when do we leave? How long do I have to wait to check out this Tesseract?”

She smiled apologetically. “Actually... my associates will be taking you meet with Phil Coulson, the director of SHIELD. Tomorrow morning at the latest, I imagine. We'll rendezvous after we're finished here and you can iron out the details with them.”

“You're not coming?” He set his glass of tea down on the grubby plastic table between them, his eyebrows raised with surprise.

“I have something else to take care of." It was only a partial answer, she knew, but she was testing him to see if he would settle for it.

“What's so important you can't come with us?” he asked, and Natasha thought she detected a note of longing threaded into his voice.

“I... have some business... in… Russia,” she admitted, hesitatingly. He peered at her for a moment, his gaze calculating. He leaned forward on the table, and Natasha looked down at his solid, sturdy forearms, his rolled shirtsleeves, the solid heft of his biceps and the thick chest hair visible through the vee of his unbuttoned shirt collar, then back to his calm, kind-looking face, his gentle eyes.

“I have something I'd like to check out in Russia myself, Agent Romanoff, so let's make a deal. Take me with you first, help me get around. Afterwards, I'll help your team research this gamma radiation-emitting artifact.”

She tilted her head, trying to choose the proper words for rejecting his offer, when her phone rang.

It was Nick, calling her back to New York and demanding she bring Bruce with her.

The Tesseract was gone. So was Barnes, and a scientist named Erik Selvig.

They left before their main course arrived.

҉

#### Central Park, New York City

Loki came, Loki saw, Loki did not conquer.

Barnes was himself once more after Steve rattled his brains enough to shake the Aesir's hold over him, and with his knowledge of Loki's operation, he was able to help them defeat the deranged prince. But by the time Tony Stark reappeared, free-falling back to Earth, from the gargantuan wormhole over New York, and the Chitauri all collapsed in the street like stringless marionettes, poor Bucky was barely verbal, the shock of once again losing control over himself, losing agency, rendering him nearly senseless with grief.

Darcy had taken one look at him, wrapped his large vibranium hand in her two small, human hands, and dragged him away, back to her apartment in Brooklyn.

The rest of them had eaten schwarma together in exhausted silence. Victorious, but not exultant. She'd called Clint to give him the good news, and he'd been furious that Nick hadn't called him in to help, although they all knew full well he was still in no state to be fighting.

Natasha elected not to worry about that potential argument, as it was not hers to have.

She was worried about other things, anyway. She could feel, even in that supposedly triumphant moment, what they all knew to be true. This was not the end. This was only the beginning.

Loki, the Chitauri, the Tesseract and the sceptre, they would not be the last of the terrible threats to Earth.

After Thor had bade them farewell, disappearing with his chained, muffled brother back to Asgard, Natasha cleared her throat.

“I know the timing might not be great for this, but I still need to deal with the issue of my blown cover,” she put forth to the group, as delicately as she could.

Tony scoffed. “Come on, Romanoff, we're heroes now! You really think the American government is going to come for you after what we just did for them?”

She leveled Tony with a calm, knowing stare. “Eventually... yes. I think they will. Even if they don't... this is something I need to do. For myself.”

Steve pulled her into a hug then, although she hadn't asked for one, and Sharon rolled her eyes at his occasionally maudlin tendencies, patting him on the shoulder and saying, “Okay, Steve, I think she gets it.” He let Natasha go with a watery smile and a request that she keep in touch, to which she promised that she would.

Tony shrugged, ready to jump into his Roadster, and looked back at Bruce, gesturing to the passenger seat. But Bruce's eyes were glued to Natasha.

“You still going to Russia, Agent Romanoff?” he asked. She nodded, eyeing him stoically. “There room for one more on your trip?”

“Hold on, pump the brakes. What the hell do you have to do in Russia? What about getting into some weird science together?” Tony asked indignantly, leaning out the window.

Bruce shrugged at him, offering a contrite smile, and sidestepped the sports car to approach Natasha. “There's something I need to do as well, over there,” he said softly enough that only she could hear it. She smiled up at him.

“Unfinished business?” she asked, and the tension around his eyes lessened when he saw that she understood. She nodded decisively. “Alright then. Let's get to work.”


	2. left ventricle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and of little value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.”   
> 
> 
> ######  _Doctor Zhivago_ , Boris Pasternak

#### Stark Tower, New York

It was Bucky's soft whimper and his panting against the back of her neck that woke Darcy up, like it had every night for the past week. But it was the cybernetic arm tightening against her ribs, slowly impeding her ability to breathe, that cleared the cobwebs from her mind and spurred her into action.

“Bucky. Bucky. Baby. It's okay, wake up, Bucky. Wake up,” she murmured, stroking the forearm that was snaked across her chest, like a metal band between her breasts, tugging hard on her shoulder to pull her torso closer to his. He groaned. “It's just a dream, Bucky. You're right here in bed with me. It's okay,” she continued, petting the flexing panels. There was a vague concern for her own safety, although she was pretty sure if she gave him a good elbow to the stomach he'd wake up. She wanted to break through to him in a gentler way than that, if she could.

The intense pressure his arm was putting on her began to lessen. Darcy knew she'd have bruises on the shoulder where his hand had gripped her. She sighed. Another thing he'd feel guilty about.

“Darcy,” he whispered against the soft skin right behind her ear. He tucked his head into the bend of her neck and groaned again, before his arm retreated from her body as he began to roll away. She grabbed at his hand before he could, and rolled over within the cage of his arm, running her hand along his back and pulling him close again.

His eyes were red, bleary, unfocused. He looked like he was still lost in the dream.

“Hiya, sarge,” she whispered, ducking her face into the soft cotton t-shirt covering his chest. “You with me now?”

He shuddered, and his metal hand, warmed by her body, landed gently on her hip. “I can't...”

“Can't what?” she asked, gently.

“I can't stop seeing it all. Loki, the scepter, helping Erik build the device. Taking down the helicarrier. Fighting my friends,” he whispered thickly, his adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed back his rising despair.

Since the Battle of Manhattan, they'd had this conversation well over a dozen times. And during each iteration, Darcy had tried to convince him that what had happened, what he'd done, had not been his fault. She decided to try a new tack this time. She said nothing, simply stroked his back and reached up to peck at his jaw.

He huffed, his hand coming up to tuck her head back into his chest as he laid his own down on his pillow. “Feel like I lost every step forward I took while we were on the road, all the progress I was makin' with Wilson.”

There was long moment of silence, and then, hesitatingly, he asked, “How can you even look at me, touch me? I've never felt so... weak... how can you trust me, when any Tom, Dick or Harry can just take over my mind like that?”

“Because that's not how it was, dude. Loki and HYDRA are not any old schmoe. They are powerful forces and what they did to you, they could have done to any of the Avengers. To anyone! To me. It doesn't make you weak or untrustworthy.” Her voice was muffled, her lips moving against the thin fabric of his t-shirt, but every word rang out like a bell to him. He felt branded by her unwavering love, her refusal to see the worst in him. “Because I love you, and we're ride or die. I wish...” She choked a bit on the words, overcome with her need to reassure him. Flinging a leg over his and resting her body against his, she tried again. “I wish you could see yourself how I see you. You're my hero.”

She felt his breath hitch, and when she raised her face from his chest to look at him, his eyes were wet. “I'm sorry,” he mumbled.

“I'm not. For any of it,” she volleyed back, resting her chin on his sternum. He smiled wetly at her, and reached up to push back a lock of her dark hair that had fallen across her face. “And I still trust you.”

“I don't deserve that,” he said quietly.

“Let me decide that for myself, baby,” she answered, sliding her hand up his arm, over the knotted muscles at the back of his shoulder, to the nape of his neck. She tugged lightly, just once, inviting him closer still. He took the invitation, leaning down to swipe his lips against hers. It was the first time they'd done this since... before. Before the battle, before Loki. There had been a lot of closeness, a lot of talking, but Bucky had been crawling out of his skin, incapable of fathoming intimacy like this in the wake of Loki's violation.

Only now, in Bucky's dark bedroom, in the soft, padded silence that wraps itself around the middle of the night, there was a gossamer sheen of safety. The kiss was not intensely sexual; Darcy simply felt the low thrum of a connection being reestablished. Comfort and trust rebuilt.

“I love you too,” he muttered, when their lips parted. She could feel the hot puffs of his words against her lips, and his eyes were so close to hers, she felt like she could have drawn each fleck of blue in his irises from memory. She brushed her cheek alongside his.

“We'll be okay, James. You're not alone this time. You've got me, and you've got Steve. And Sam. And the Avengers. We can get through this,” she whispered into his ear. His gave her a silent, grateful squeeze, and she felt his body relax into hers.

They stayed that way, their breaths deepening in tandem until eventually their chests rose and fell as one, their hearts beating in time together, as they sank back into sleep.

҉

It took them a week or so to get their visas ready to enter Russia. Natasha knew full well she'd never enter the country legitimately, and although the two agents who now made up SHIELD's forgery division worked tirelessly to create a passport, visa, and sponsor for her and Bruce, these things took time. Doroga lozhka k obyedu, Natasha thought. A stitch in time and all of that. She put the week to good use, doing her part to nurture the fledgling camaraderie that had been established during the Battle of Manhattan. Ensuring things would not fall apart the moment she left American soil. Bruce caved on day two of Tony badgering him to spend the downtime in his tower, and moved into a soothingly featureless suite on the north side of the building. He did yoga in the mornings with Pepper, then spent his days helping Tony explore the potential of the new element he had discovered, which the man continued to insist on calling "badassium".

In this fashion, they waited.

҉

“So, are you going to put in a good word with Stark or do I have to beg him to make me some toys all by myself?” Sharon asked, leaning into the arm of the love-seat she was occupying and taking a sip of her margarita.

Natasha scoffed. “The Widow's Bite is not a toy, Sharon...”

“Buuut I happen to know for a _fact_ that if you tell him how much you like Natasha's weapons, he'll work double time to make you something even more impressive. You're Peggy Carter's niece, he already adores you. And fears you, a little bit. Plus, he's... very competitive. Especially with himself,” Pepper offered, smiling warmly at the agent. Sharon's lips curled into a smirk, and she cocked her head at Natasha.

“It's your funeral. Don't blame me when he goes way overboard,” Natasha conceded. “Darcy, what's wrong? You don't like the drink? I'll make you something else, daragaya, what do you want?”

Darcy was curled up on the couch next to her, and had barely said anything since she'd slunk in, half an hour late, looking worried and distracted. Natasha knew she had come from James' apartment. She'd been running her finger around the salt-covered rim of her glass in silence for the duration of the involved weapons discussion the women had been having.

“Hm? Oh, no. It's great. I'm just... I don't...” Darcy bit her lip, fighting for control of her emotions.

“It's Barnes,” Sharon provided helpfully.

“I'm so freaked out about him, guys. He's distant, and he's not sleeping well, and... and... I know the reason why, but I just want to help him somehow,” Darcy confessed, looking around the room at the other women.

Pepper sighed. “It's the same with Tony,” she said in a hushed tone. “Nightmares of the wormhole, of the Chitauri, of...”

“Losing Manhattan, and then the world, to Loki, or whoever gave Loki the scepter?” Natasha asked knowingly. When Pepper turned to her, eyes wide, she shrugged. “I can imagine what those nightmares might look like.”

“Steve's been blaming himself, too. Well, he generally blames himself for everything anyway. The man would find a way to blame himself for the earth going round the sun if he thought it would do some good. He's especially torn up about Bucky,” Sharon noted, a rare look of vulnerability on her face. “But I have my own nightmares to contend with, and to be honest, I don't know the words to make it better.”

“So what do you say?” Darcy sniffed, and Natasha flung her arm around the younger woman's shoulders, pulling her close.

“Uh... I express my appreciation for him... ha, well... in other ways.” She winked at the group, and took another sip of her margarita to hide her sly smile.

“Captain America has sex?” Pepper blurted out.

“None of your business, Potts,” Sharon replied, although she was grinning from ear to ear and laughed delightedly when Pepper wrinkled her nose, looking scandalized. Darcy could never resist Sharon's laugh, and began to chuckle weakly herself. Natasha gave her fellow agent an approving thumbs up.

“We're working on the physical stuff. It's hard right now, he's just... well. I think he's really angry, and I think he feels violated,” Darcy whispered. Natasha squeezed her arm, smiling sympathetically when she glanced up at the spy.

“These things take time, ladies,” Natasha started, aware that her friends' eyes were on her. She chose her words carefully. “Battles, losing control over your mind, your body... you can heal from these things. But... it takes time. 'Vremya — luchshiy doktor.'”

“The only part of that I understood was... 'doctor',” Darcy muttered drolly.

“Based on context clues, I'm going with... 'time heals all wounds'?” Sharon guessed.

Natasha nodded with satisfaction. “Exactly. The wait is excruciating, but the healing will come. And the knowledge that you lived through this process, that you are different but not lesser, is what helps you carry on. Your survival feeds itself.”

Darcy leaned her head on her shoulder. “Well, 'vampire lucky doctor' to you too, Natasha,” she murmured, smirking slightly when Natasha rolled her eyes. “And thanks, guys. I keep telling Bucky he's not alone. It's nice to know I'm not, either.”

҉

#### Tony Stark's jet, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean

Bruce settled deeper into his plush leather chair, flinching nervously and slamming his eyes shut when a bit of turbulence rocked the plane slightly to the left. When he finally opened them again and looked at her, Natasha shot him a small smile. After falling out of a helicarrier, even in his nigh-invincible guise as the Hulk, the man had every right to be a little nervous about being up in the air again. He nodded back to her, and she returned her attention to the sporadic cloud cover beneath them, interrupted occasionally by a break where the gleaming, almost metallic-looking surface of the ocean could be glimpsed down below. The plane dipped, and Bruce's grip on his armrests turned his knuckles white from strain. The plastic frame of the chair began to creak threateningly, and Natasha slid her hand down between the seat and the wall panel, reaching towards the pistol she'd secured in the stowage bin. 

Soon enough they leveled out, the drone of the engines and the pressurization inside the cabin fading away to white noise. She continued to watch Bruce from the corner of her eyes. He fell asleep not long after the plane settled into a calm, unexciting glide far above the clouds, lightly snoring after his head rolled forward onto his chest.

Eyes still trained on Bruce, she began to think about Pasha, about how often he used to fly. Whenever there was a mechanical failure that resulted in the need for immediate inspection or repairs, he was one of the first men that officials called. Not just in Stalingrad, either. All over the Soyuz. Moscow, Siberia, Belarus, the Baltics, Yugoslavia... it hadn't mattered. Pasha's skills had been in high demand.

He'd taken her with him one day, on an emergency job. The call had come very early in the morning, before her mother had awaken. It had been May first, labor day, and little five-year-old Natasha had been excited because her parents had told her the night before that she would be allowed to go outside and play with the other children from the neighborhood for the entire day. But her father had woken her when the sun was still low in the sky, asking her if she wanted to go for a drive. She'd said yes, of course. She had loved driving in their car, had been so proud that they were a family who owned one. 

Pasha had looked terrible in those days, dark circles shadowing his eyes and the gaunt, sunken look of a man carrying the weight of the world. She'd been too young to understand why.

She understood well enough now.

He'd driven her across the city to a power plant. On the way, he'd talked to her of the Leviathan. It had been a strange conversation. Her parents being good, law-abiding Soviet citizens, Natasha had been raised in an atheist household, as was mandated by the state. She hadn't had any familiarity with the biblical sea monster.

Her father had explained it carefully, slowly, pausing several times to make sure she understood what he was saying.

“Now, Natalia, tell me what is Leviathan,” he'd prompted, when finished.

“It is a great and powerful monster, Otets. It lives in the sea but we must be vigilant because it can call to us, and lure us into its kingdom,” she chirped back at him.

“Good, Natashenka, molodets. Now, what did Job say about Leviathan?”

Natasha remembered how she'd kicked at the dashboard anxiously while she thought, not wanting to disappoint her stern father. He'd shot her a reproving glance and she'd stilled, then answered, “Job says that it is hopeless to fight the beast, we must run from him. Even looking at him can bring disaster. But Papochka, who is Job?”

“A wise man,” her father responded, keeping his eyes on the empty street in front of them. Many neighborhoods in Stalingrad were still practically decimated in those days, entire buildings sitting in ugly heaps of rubble. On that quiet holiday morning, only the women who swept the sidewalks with their handmade brooms and a few passed-out drunks populated the streets. “What will you do, if someone says to you that they work for the Leviathan?”

“I will run,” she'd recited. “And not speak to anyone but you or mama.”

He'd nodded again, and silence had filled the cold air of their family's Moskvitch sedan. Once at the plant, he'd placed Natasha on a chair in an office, telling her to stay put while he worked. He'd been gone for three hours and Natasha could just barely remember a kind-faced secretary who had at some point given her a class of milk, then pencil and paper so she could draw idly while she waited.

When he'd returned to the office he'd seemed even more anxious, gathering Natasha and her coat quickly then hauling her back to the car, her small hand held tight in his large, calloused one. After depositing her back at the flat he'd disappeared with a kiss to the top of her head and a promise extracted from her to remember what they'd discussed.

It had been the last time she'd ever seen him.

҉

#### Ostafyevo International Airport, Moscow

Natasha held her breath as she watched Bruce answer the questions of the dour, grey-faced woman in uniform. The immigration officer's eyes narrowed in suspicion as she inspected his documents, then glanced up at his face. When she moved to type something into her computer, Bruce peered back in the line at her, smiling sheepishly, and something inside of her twinged. He was really charming, she acknowledged, and it had everything to do with how he didn't try to be. Didn't even seem to want to try.

If the woman behind the desk saw something she didn't like with his documents, she let it pass, because she slammed her rubber stamp loudly into the last page of his passport, pulling his focus back to her, then handed his bundle of papers back to him. Her eyes flicked to the next person in line, dismissing him with an inattentive nod.

Natasha finally allowed herself to exhale. She was not worried about her own cover story, nor about her identification. She reached up casually, rubbing at her left eye as though she was simply scratching an itch. The photostatic veil was still firmly in place, reassembling her features into a Natasha-esque face that might have been her sister. The face matched the one in her passport photo, belonging to a Tatiana Sokolova. The identity wouldn't do in the long run. After all, it belonged a woman who still existed. But it would get her into the country, get her foot in the door.

She watched Bruce's retreating back as he moved through the opaque doors behind the immigration officer's booth. Even after everything, after the control she'd seen him exert over his alter ego, over his own nerves, she'd had some reservations about Bruce's ability keep his cool. Maybe she was underestimating him, though. In any case, with Bruce safely on Russian soil they were essentially home free.

Literally _and_ metaphorically, in Natasha's case.

҉

#### Stark Tower, New York

“Hey, Bucky?” Darcy's voice was soft, low, barely audible over Judy Garland's soaring contralto belting out a line about blue birds. She was laying half on top of him on the comfortable over-stuffed couch in his dark living room, and he turned his attention from _The Wizard of Oz_ to her, eyes narrowing at the slight wobble in her voice.

“You okay?” he croaked, his voice hoarse from disuse.

“Yeah, I just... I had a thought. I got a call from Jane Foster, my old boss, yesterday. She's back from Norway. I mean, she's back in England. And... well, she wants me to come visit. And honestly? I kind of want to go see her. It feels like it's been forever. I could use a little time away from New York, too.”

She watched him consider what she was saying, his pupils wide in the dark room. The crisp sepia images on the screen reflected off her glasses, and he gently tugged them away from her face so he could look into her eyes.

“I understand,” he said at last.

She rubbed one hand across his stubble-covered cheek. “I want you to come with me.”

“Don't think that's a good idea,” he said, after another moment of studying her.

“Can I make an alternative argument?” she asked. He grimaced a little at the slight hint of sass in her voice.

“Sure, angel. What's your angle?”

She readjusted herself, resting her head on his shoulder. “We need to get away from all this devastation for a while. We've both been working like crazy to help the cleanup effort, and the city has made a lot of progress. But we need to think about our own mental health, too. I know I didn't experience... what, I mean, well, what you did... during the battle. But it was still traumatic for me. So let's just go have some fun. We'll visit Jane for a few days in London, and then we'll go check out the OG cryptid up in Scotland.”

“OG?” he asked, an eyebrow quirked in bemusement.

“Oh! Hah. Slang. OG. Original gangster.”

Sighing, he asked, “Are we talking about Nessie? You're not going to make me wear a snorkel again, are you?”

“Is that a yes?” She grinned, teasing a hand along his pectoral, down the taut muscles of his abdomen. She paused before daring to go any lower. Although she'd wanted to do this for weeks, was aching to feel his hands on her, she hadn't wanted to push for anything.

He huffed. “You know we ain't been working here for more than a month, right Darce? We really going to ask for a vacation already?”

She sobered, her hand flattening to a solid pressure and sliding back up to press comfortingly on his chest. “You don't think we deserve it? You don't think _you_ deserve it?” She tilted her head, clearly ready for a challenge.

He glanced at the now bright, technicolor scene playing out on the screen, then back at Darcy. Concern and need were written across her face. “Yeah,” he said, shuddering as he took a deep breath, giving her a faint smile, “I could use a break from all this. Let's go see what ol' Nessie's been up to.”

She smiled, running her hand down his abdomen once more and this time when she paused, his hand joined hers, pushing it under the elastic band of his loose sweatpants. Then he shifted, pulling her leg over his and urging her to bring her mouth down to meet his. She sighed happily into the kiss, ecstatic both from the slow, tingling rush of her arousal and his acceptance of this kind of intimacy. He growled into her mouth when she grabbed his hardening shaft in her small hand, and before she knew it, she had been flipped, her back sinking into the fluffy couch cushions and Bucky settling himself between her thighs, his full lips moving along the sensitive skin of her neck, hands grasping the hem of her t-shirt.

He looked up at her for permission, and she nodded. Relieved, happy tears spilled down her cheeks before she could stop them. He leaned forward, brushing his lips over each of their tracks, then helped her out of her t-shirt. She returned the favor by helping him out of his. He moved to pull her leggings off, sliding his hands along her legs, much more toned now after a month of Sharon's tutelage. Things became a heated blur after that, but much later, when Bucky would try to claim that he had seen _The Wizard of Oz_ , Darcy would give him a sly, disbelieving look until he admitted that, well okay, he'd really only paid attention to the first fifteen minutes or so.

҉

#### Uryupinsk, Russia

Halfway between Moscow and Volgograd, there was a small town. To all who were familiar with it, or who had been there, its given name was synonymous with 'swampy backwater town'. Not a particularly fortuitous omen, Natasha thought, as she stepped out of their non-descript rental car and peered around the quiet street, lined with one Khrushchyovka-style apartment building after another. There was a dead tree here or there, but the spindly branches and the heavy, woolen-looking sky above did nothing to alleviate the grim pallor that hung over the place. She turned to watch Bruce climb out of the passenger seat, then hop from foot to foot as he zipped up his large thermal coat. He blew on his hands, looking around to get his bearings.

“Alright, Bruce,” Natasha said placidly. “Care to tell me now?”

During the six-hour drive south from Moscow they'd discussed, in no particular order: what Freud would have thought about Loki and Thor's relationship, the future of the robotics industry, the basics of Russian grammar, the basics of yoga, the merits of shawarma versus gyros, Brazil (a country they'd both been to although had danced around the reasons why), how wormholes operated, and which exact blend of fruits or vegetables led to the best smoothie. Natasha had known from the jump that he was intelligent, but she was surprised to find how perceptive and thoughtful he was in their discussions. His smiles were shy and hesitant but when he spoke, there was a level of confidence in his knowledge that she couldn't help but admire. Especially considering the wide breadth of things he knew so much about.

She could feel herself developing an affection for him, just a little bit. He was sweet and earnest and when he thought she wasn't paying attention he looked at her the way a child looks at an unopened candy bar on their teacher's desk, wondering if they can get away with stealing it. Bruce trying to steal her might be an enjoyable endeavor, she mused.

There was, however, one glaring omission from their long, amorphous conversation, and that was the reason why Bruce had wanted to come to this place. He'd told her she'd laugh if she knew, and that he'd tell her when they reached their destination. Well, Natasha had been trained to be a patient woman. She could bite back whatever curiosity she had if she knew she'd get her answers eventually.

And now here they were, having driven past the sleepy town square with its red brick administrative buildings and its customary white orthodox church, replete with three onion-domed towers. Squinting at the building number on the nearest apartment block, Bruce shoved his hands in his pockets and jerked his head back in the direction of the town square, then began treading through the light dusting of snow. Natasha caught up with him easily.

She didn't like this street. There were literally thousands of apartments looking down on them, and the brilliant afternoon sun turned all the windows to her right opaque. She spun as she walked, doing her best to take in anything that looked irregular. She'd placed her gun in her thigh holster before exiting the car and she casually rested her hand on it now, flipping back the small strap that kept it secured.

“This is it,” he said quietly, pulling up before a nondescript apartment building that looked exactly like the ones to its left or right. Natasha squinted against the sun, then pulled her sunglasses out of her pocket so she could stare at the building alongside Bruce.

“So. What are we looking at here?”

Bruce gave a hangdog shrug, then attempted to stifle his grin. She arched an eyebrow at him, spinning again to take in their surroundings then looking back at the building. If he thought she was going to ask him again, that she couldn't wait him out, he did not realize who he was dealing with.

Finally, he said, “Okay, you got me. We're not looking for anything. There isn't some big important mission. I just wanted to see this street, and this building for myself.”

Natasha sighed. “Because...?”

“You know who Emil Blonsky is?” he asked, glancing down at her.

She screwed up her face as she pondered the name, and then it struck her. “The Abomination?”

“That's how he died, yeah. Well, how I thought he died, er, who he was when we fought, back in Harlem. That's not how he was born. Once, he was just little Emil. Raised in England, yes, but born in Russia, in a nowhere town named Ur... Uryurp...”

“Uryupinsk,” Natasha murmured.

“Yeah. In this building. Apartment number three one six.'”

Natasha had gone very still. When Bruce glanced at her again, he almost thought he saw a trace of regret, or maybe longing, dash across her features. Then it was gone. In a firmer voice, she asked, “So. This was the birthplace of your enemy?”

“Nah, no. It's not like that. I did that to him, it was me, do you see? You know his case file, don't you? He wouldn't have been able to access the serum if I hadn't been messing around with it, if I hadn't mixed gamma radiation with the serum to use on myself.”

“Was it your fault he was a violent, power-hungry psychopath as well?” Natasha asked coolly.

Bruce scoffed. “Who knows! Maybe. Maybe the serum messed him up. Maybe he could've had a normal life, rather than whatever kind of life he's having now. I know he's alive, by the way. Found his file in SHIELD's leaked documents. Apparently he's been cryogenically frozen, and stored in some facility in Alaska. As far as I'm concerned, I did that to him.”

Natasha continued to gaze at the uninteresting building that loomed before them. “Bruce, by that logic, Erskin did this to both of you, and Steve was his accomplice.”

He grinned a little repentantly at that, ducking his head. “Okay, I get it. This is probably a melodramatic move. I just thought, er, maybe if I saw where he was born...”

“It would explain something about him,” Natasha finished for him.

“Is this stupidest thing anyone has ever made you do?” he asked, embarrassed.

She smiled crookedly. “Not by a long shot. But tell me, since you came all this way... does it help? Seeing it? Have your questions about Blonsky been answered?”

“Not really,” he admitted, kicking at the snow to try and get some feeling back in his toes.

Natasha sighed. “I'm sorry, Bruce,” she said, and there was a sincerity in her voice that caused him to whip his head back around, looking down at her with alarm.

“Why?”

“You deserve to have answers. And peace. I wish I could give that to you,” she said. He stared at her, astounded, for a fraught moment, but she was already turning back towards the car without meeting his gaze or removing her sunglasses.

A hare, its coat winter white, was resting in front the driver door as she approached it. It fidgeted at the sight of her approaching, her shadow tossing it into shade. With a sudden burst of energy and bravery, it hopped past her, disappearing into one of the many small alleys between the buildings.

Bad luck, she thought gloomily, although she didn't breathe a word of it to Bruce.

҉

#### Volgograd, Russia

It only took her a few hours to find her parents, mostly due to the red tape that impeded getting any sort of information from Volgograd's administrative offices. The cemetery where she'd installed plots for them had been moved at some point between the last time she'd lived in this city and now, and the man tasked with keeping those records had been reluctant to share its new whereabouts, glowering at the obviously non-Russian man she'd brought with her.

Natasha, however, was a very persuasive woman. 

Which is why she was now pulling some of the deadened weeds from the hard, snow-covered ground around the two small stones that served as the only reminder to the world that her parents had existed. Besides her.

The graves were empty, she knew, although this too she did not say to Bruce. She had tried to convince him he didn't want to come, that he would be much more comfortable settling in at the hotel and sleeping off some of his jetlag, but he had stubbornly insisted. So here they were, Natasha crouched over the stones as she cleared away cigarette butts and several cans of energy drinks she'd found nearby while Bruce watched passively, leaning against a nearby tree.

“I can't read Cyrillic, what were their names?” he asked softly.

She sighed. Now he'd feel pity for her. Pity was not an emotion she had any use for. “Alexander Nikolayevich Romanova and Helena Petrovna Romanova. They died when I was very young.” And left me to fend for myself, was what she wanted to say, although it also went unspoken.

There was a small fence surrounding the plot, and after handing the trash to Bruce with a nod towards a nearby metal can, Natasha began to pluck the snow-covered vines from the chain links. He returned, leaning over the fence as he watched her work. 

“You could leave 'em, they look kind of nice.” He smiled cautiously when she glanced up at him.

“ _Now_ they do,” she admitted, pausing to admire how the snow clung to the withered leaves and made them look romantic, “but if I leave them here they'll overrun this fence in a few years.”

“Not planning on returning for a while?” he asked.

Natasha shrugged, and exited through the small gate at the foot of her parents' graves, heading towards the trash can with her handful of vines. “Life is unpredictable. Better to do it now,” was all she said.

“We should get some flowers.” He raised his eyebrows innocently at her when her gaze, sharp and probing, cut over to him. But she merely nodded, and headed out of the cemetery. He said nothing as they walked towards a small flower stand nearby, approaching the old woman who sat, completely bundled, on a small stool behind the display. He said nothing as Natasha overpaid, giving the woman a thousand Rubles for a handful of roses and refusing the change, and he said nothing on the trek back to the plot. He said nothing when she carefully placed the bouquet on the snow between the two headstones.

Natasha said nothing as well. She was remembering how she'd bought this plot, in her early twenties. There were no earthly remains of her parents as far as she knew, they hadn't been seen for years. But she'd been given some spending money for missions, and she'd managed to squirrel away enough of it to make this purchase during one the rare times she was not actively undercover.

Her parents. After Pasha had dropped her off at their home on that terrible May Day she'd gone inside to find her mother was not there. She'd waited for days, her terror and hunger mounting as she ate everything they had stored in the flat. Her neighbors had dropped in her, their concern growing with her own, and they'd dropped off cabbage rolls and soup to help keep her sustained.

Finally, a week to the day since she'd last seen her father, a well-dressed man had come to the door. When she'd opened it, after he'd promised that he was a friend of Pasha and Helena's, that he simply wanted to leave a package for them, she'd peered out both ways into the hall. The old blue-haired lady who'd lived in the corner flat on the east end had been leaning in her doorway, watching the interaction with interest. The man had smiled at her, oozing charm and bonhomie. But something about his smarmy voice had unsettled Natasha.

And then he'd told her that he worked for an agency named Leviathan.

That was when Natasha had kicked him in the shins as hard as she could with her small, unshod foot, nearly breaking her toes in the process. He'd stumbled back in surprise and Natasha had run out the door, up the long corridor, skipping stairs as she leaped down the stairwell and burst out of the ground floor entrance, disappearing as fast as her little legs could take her into the maze of nearby buildings.

She couldn't be sure how long she'd ran. It had felt like hours. When she finally stopped, she was in a part of the city she did not recognize. It was louder than her quiet district, there was rubble everywhere, and dark smoke from nearby factories billowed up into the sky above her. She had been truly lost, and Pasha had told her to trust no one.

She never went back to the flat.

Natasha shook her head, focusing on the contrast of the red rose petals against the mostly untrampled white snow. Her mother would've been pleased by the neatness, by the juxtaposition of color, by the sentiment of Natasha pretending to bury her parents in the hopes of bringing herself some semblance of peace.

Bruce cleared his throat. She looked up from the snow, slightly dazed after the onslaught of memories, and glanced back at him, leaning against the gate.

“So... your home town,” he started, smiling affably, his body language relaxed and nonthreatening, “Want to give me the grand tour?”

Natasha returned the smile, following him as he turned and retraced their tracks in the snow back to the car. “Sure,” she said, “That I _can_ do.”


	3. right ventricle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I think... if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.”   
> 
> 
> ######  _Anna Karenina_ , Leo Tolstoy

#### Volgograd, Russia

“Humor me, Tasha, and remind me why we can't do this during the day? When this office is open? And we can walk through the front doors?”

Natasha sighed, and braced herself against the step-ladder she'd scrounged up in a nearby utility closet while she closed the window they'd both just climbed through. “Clerks who end up in the Zapis Aktov Grazhdanskogo Sostoyaniya take their responsibilities very seriously, and they tend to not accept bribes. I'm not in the mood for violence, are you?”

“But don't you know your birthday?” Bruce asked, accepting the flashlight Natasha handed him, then following her down the staircase that led to the subterranean archives. She remembered the layout of this building all too well, now that she was inside it once again. “That would make it relatively simple to find your birth certificate.”

Natasha paused in front of a metal door, its chipping paint a dingy grey. They were three signs posted on it. One read “свидетельство о рождении”, the next read “свидетельство о браке”, and the final read “свидетельство о смерти”. Birth, marriage, death: for some people, the only information you needed to understand their lives could be found on those three certificates.

She knelt before the door, reaching into her bag to produce a small kit in which she kept her tension wrench and pick. She inserted both into the doorknob keyhole, and began to fiddle with the pick until she heard the internal pins setting. “May I remind you again, Bruce, that this was not a required stop for you on your Russian field trip?”

“Message received,” he said, chuckling softly and raising his hands in concession, “Just a curious guy asking too many questions. Don't mind me.”

The last pin clicked into place and Natasha squeezed the knob, then turned it. The door was heavy but slid open with a plaintive, metallic groan. The interior was dark, but after a perimeter search revealed that the room had no windows, she closed the door behind them and flipped the light switch. The room's three bare light bulbs, hanging several feet above their heads, threw into stark relief slightly musty but orderly rows of shelves, labeled by month and year. To their far right were the stacks marked “Death”, in the center were those marked “Marriage,” and directly in front of the door, the objective of Natasha's mission, were the stacks bearing the sign “Birth.”

She studiously avoided looking at the other two stacks. She knew she would find no document for her parents among the death certificates, and the marriages... she knew what she wouldn't find there, as well. She _did_ have marriage certificates with the slightly altered name the KGB had given her on them, but they were in the ZAGS archives in Moscow. And in other countries.

More importantly, it wasn't information that would help her to build a new life, just more details that would drag her back into her ugly past. And returning to Volgograd had done enough of that for her already.

She glanced at Bruce, trying to gauge how much she could trust him. She wanted to trust him; she had this odd urge to tell him things about herself that she'd never said out loud before. Things she hadn't admitted even to herself in a long time. It was the reason she'd allowed him to come along on this nighttime caper: nazvalsya gruzdem — polezay v kuzov, she reasoned. She'd called herself a mushroom, and now it was time to get into the basket. Or as westerners, who always understood things better when placed in terms of money, would say: in for a penny, in for a pound.

“Bruce...” she began, turning and giving him her full attention, “I have two birth certificates. One has been digitized and is easily accessible to anyone looking for it, purposefully so, and one is not. There's only an off chance that my other certificate is in here, but I wanted to try. If it is... it's an identity I can use. I could've replicated it, true, but I think it'll strengthen my case if I can find the original document.”

He shoved his hands in his coat pockets, and raised his eyebrows, tilting his head in an invitation for her to continue. She smoothed down a stray coppery lock, then stared at the rows of documents. 

“The one that's digitized, that's the one you've been using?” he asked, when he realized she would not tell him any more unless he asked.

“Not recently,” she said, checking the nearest row for the year and then moving to her left, farther back in time. “It was... falsified for me. By the KGB. They decided in the mid-eighties that it was advantageous for me to exist, so... I did. Before that... I didn't.”

He frowned at her, his brows furrowing as he began to understand what she was saying. His voice was gentle when he asked, “When exactly were you born, Natasha?”

“It's complicated. I'm twenty-eight, and I was born in 1984. This is the truth. But also... I'm not, and I wasn't. This is also the truth,” she murmured, as she continued to move to her left. Bruce glanced at the years she was skipping and his eyes widened slightly, but she was already moving to the next shelf and earlier decades.

She stopped in front of the shelf with the year she'd been searching for. Bruce's frown deepened.

From the corner of her eyes, she monitored his reaction. She registered his surprise, some concern, but nothing more, and relaxed slightly. She turned back to the files. Four numbers, placed together to give order to the passing of time and space. Just one of her truths, a lone foot-soldier in the army of little secrets she'd held onto tightly all these years. Some of them, like these four numbers, were secrets that she actively willed herself not to think about for too long or in too much depth most days.

Yes, this was the year she had been born to Helena and Pasha. But she'd been remade by the Red Room, and in so many ways, 1984 was the year she had become who she was now. The Black Widow.

How strange, she thought, that after all these years she would need to go back the beginning to move forward. Pushing the sentiment aside, she began to dig through the frayed and faded birth certificates issued by the city of Stalingrad in November of 1938.

҉

#### Stark Tower, New York City

Tony paused on the threshold of the kitchen upon seeing the golden circle of light cast by a single hanging lamp. Underneath it, sitting hunched tiredly on one of the tall stools that surrounded the marble-topped island, was Bucky. He was in the middle of sipping from a glass of something brown, and he returned the drink to the counter, eyes darting to the shadowy corners of the room guiltily, when he noticed Tony.

The owner of said alcohol rolled his own eyes, entering the room and grabbing a tumbler for himself before joining Bucky at the island. He grabbed the bottle, noting that the older man had gotten into his good stuff, a Macallan 1926, then slid it away from its station beside Bucky's arm and poured himself two fingers. He eyeballed the glass, then added a splash more.

“Chitauri?” he asked, interrupting the hushed serenity of the late-night scene. He dropped two ice cubes into the beverage and took a seat across the island.

“Loki,” Bucky muttered, his voice ragged and raspy. “You?”

“Wormhole,” he answered.

The men drank silently for several minutes.

“You know this is a seventy-five thousand dollar bottle of scotch, right?” Tony asked.

Bucky shrugged, grimacing in some approximation of penitence, then raised an eyebrow. “You want to take it out of my hazard pay?”

“No. I want to take it out on your dumb face,” was the off-hand barb he got in response, followed by more silence.

“Boxing tomorrow?” Bucky asked at last. “I'll go one-handed. You can choose which, and you can have at my face.”

Tony huffed softly, pleased with the offer, and grinned. “Meetings all day. Eight pm work for you?” Bucky nodded, and the men resumed their gazing into the amber liquid sloshing around their fine crystal glasses.

“So... England?” Tony asked, after taking another swallow and refilling his glass. Bucky looked up at him warily, and Tony rolled his eyes again. “Lewis works for SHIELD, I'm bankrolling SHIELD. Obviously I keep tabs on her, including requests for time off... because it helps me keep tabs on you. Would you really expect anything different from me?”

Bucky gave him a crooked smile, leaning on his elbows as he slumped farther over the counter. “Nah, that's exactly what I expect from you. Just figured you'd be happy to have me out of your hair.”

“Didn't say I'm not,” Tony answered glibly. “Just want to know what precautions you've taken.”

“Me. I'm the precaution. I'm the problem and the solution, how 'bout that?” Bucky muttered glumly.

“Yeah, the pity party's fun and all, trust me I get it, but seriously? You know about the recent activity in that area. Does she?”

Bucky nodded. “She knows. She'll be with me. We'll be armed. We're using falsified identities, and we'll pay for everything with cash. Off the grid, as much as possible.”

Finishing his drink, Tony bobbed his head approvingly and stood. “Still. Keep in touch, huh?”

“You gonna miss me, Stark?” Bucky jibed, smirking.

“Eh, I've grown accustomed to your face. And I hate change,” Tony quipped over his shoulder, leaving the former assassin to his nightcap.

҉

#### Volgograd, Russia

When Natasha closed her eyes that night, the memories came almost immediately. It was like searching though those old files, sneaking around that forlorn government building, had unlocked them.

The summer of 1944 had been brutal. The Battle of Stalingrad had just ended a year before, a slog she remembered only vaguely as a time when she was she often hiding in dank, windowless cellars for days on end while outside gunfire exploded through the air. The city had still been in ruins. Without Pasha's important job cushioning young Natalia from the brutal reality of life in that time and place, the hardships had piled up quickly. 

She'd been so hungry. That was one thing she remembered very clearly, the absolute consciousness of her empty belly at all times, pulled tight as a drum and clenching painfully as she darted around the far-flung corners of Stalingrad, trying to scavenge whatever she could find. Uncertain who to trust, and as a result, trusting no one.

She'd been lucky, Natasha knew, that her parents had gone missing in May, when the weather was beginning to soften and the short Russian summer was meekly creeping in, with its longer days and milder nights.

She'd gathered enough discarded newspapers to fashion a nest of sorts for herself in one of the bombed-out buildings, then managed to steal some shoes and a warm coat from a garden where they'd been hung out to dry. Food had been the main problem; it'd been a lean time for everyone anyway, the extreme cold, the loss of so many lives, and the small harvests from the previous several years leaving most of the USSR tightening its belt. Natalia's pride had very quickly worn out, and she'd often spent her evenings wandering from shop to shop, begging for anything they could spare as they were closing.

It had gotten her through, kept her alive, although she'd been gaunt and listless by the time August had rolled around. She'd still been holding on, but just barely, and fear of the impending winter plus her rumbling stomach had made sleep hard to come by. This in turn had left her weaker, and little Natalia had been confronted with the very adult fear of what the future held for her.

That was when Madame B. had appeared.

Natasha started at the thought of her, pushing back the scratchy hotel linens and rising from her bed. The harsh chemical smell of her hair dye still lingered in the air, and she peered over at Bruce to see if it was bothering him like it was her.

He was fast asleep, breathing deeply and snoring a little on every exhale. She smiled at the sight. He was a fairly mellow man in his waking days, at least compared to his fellow Avengers, and in his sleep he looked less wearied, younger. She could almost imagine who he'd been before... the other. The Hulk.

She passed from the room into the minuscule bathroom, gently closing the door before she turned on the light. She examined her jet-black hair in the mirror. Black certainly wasn't her favorite way to go, and she'd always prefer her naturally brilliant crimson hair if the choice was up to her, but she really needed to lower her profile and this particular shade of raven was fairly popular in this part of the world. It would suffice, for the time being. She'd ditched the scratchy wig she'd worn to get through the Moscow airport in a dumpster somewhere during their drive, but even with the photostatic veil Natasha was not fond of taking stupid risks. So, hair dye.

And it had been a decent excuse to get Bruce's hands on her. She'd considered it an experiment, a test run, and the firm, pleasant pressure of his hands, encased in the rubber gloves the box of dye had come with, had felt lovely on her scalp. The test run had provided good results, she'd concluded. He wasn't half bad at dying hair, either. She wondered now, examining the strands in the back with a hand mirror held aloft and her back to the larger, wall-mounted mirror, if he'd ever done it for himself back when he was on the run. She wondered why he'd volunteered to continue on this journey with her, even now that he'd seen what he came to see.

They'd joked about the opportunities this could open up for him as he worked, planning a hypothetical Hulk-themed salon he could open in New York one day if he ever decided to make a go at the beautician business.

It had felt... nice, somehow natural and comfortable, lounging in that shabby bathroom together. Slowly relaxing into companionship. She hadn't really wanted the evening to end. But she had needed to shower so she could rinse the dye out, and by the time she'd stepped out of the bathroom (wrapped in only a towel, another experiment) Bruce had already been passed out on his bed, that evening's eleven o'clock Vremya bulletin quietly detailing the extravagant recent purchase of billionaire American playboy Tony Stark in the background.

҉

#### Minsk, Belarus

They didn't have Tony Stark's private jet for this leg of the journey, so they flew commercial from Volgograd to Minsk. SHIELD's forged documents continued to serve their purposes, and this time when Bruce stepped up to the stern-looking uniformed man sitting behind the immigration desk, Natasha barely worried. He'd proven to her that he could keep a cool head, even under fairly stressful circumstances, and although she'd had serious reservations about him joining her on this part of her mission, well... mushroom, basket.

She trusted him. He hadn't mentioned her real age, hadn't pushed her to discuss her past once since their visit to the registration office. Had just continued in his assumed role as her shy, somewhat awkward shadow as she moved around Volgograd, taking the necessary steps to bring Natalia Alianovna Romanova back from the dead. It had been assumed that she'd died in the Battle of Stalingrad, and then she was merely Natasha, student of the Red Room, for a very long time. After that she was an, agent, picking up and discarding so many names that none of them meant anything, until she became Natasha Romanoff, official agent of the KGB. So close to her actual self, and still just a facsimile.

Bruce smiled at her over his plate of potato pancakes, looking around the tiny restaurant curiously. It had a homey, living room feel and it very well might have been a part of someone's home; it was located inside a concrete apartment building in the suburbs of Minsk, there was a curtain hanging over the doorway that led to the kitchen and a railing halfway up the wall that held USSR commemorative plates of all the old political lions spanning the entire room. The woman who'd come to their table had spoken to them in Belarusian and although she'd understood when Natasha ordered their draniki and mushroom soup in Russian, she'd continued to use her mother tongue when asking for their drinks. Bruce had asked to try the seasonally inappropriate kvass, a drink made from fermented rye, and the woman's eyes slid towards Bruce when Natasha asked for it, but he'd simply grinned and the women had snorted through her nose bullishly, passing her sullen judgment for his request, then withdrawn from their table.

Post-soviet hospitality at its finest, she'd told him jokingly once they were finished their meal and walking down the icy sidewalk back towards the truck she'd rented.

Bruce slid into the passenger seat, and offered his usual genial smile. She felt that warm twinge again at the sight of it, by this point a familiar sensation, and returned the gesture before focusing on getting them out of the city and onto the M4, which would take them most of the way south to the town of Maryina Horka. 

They'd go on foot from there.

҉

#### Stark Tower, New York

Sharon bent her neck and rested her damp forehead against Steve's equally sweaty shoulder for a moment, basking in the last few bolts of pleasure thrumming through her body as he rocked up into her reflexively. His hand, large and too-warm and also perfect, landed on her spine, rubbing gently up and down the length of her back. She shifted her head, laving at the dancing vein in his neck. She felt it flutter against her tongue, and he exhaled softly.

She climbed off him, shooting him a smirk as she flipped her mussed blonde hair over her shoulder and sauntered off to the bathroom. He was still sitting on the bed, wide shoulders leaning against the headboard and head lolled back to rest against the wall behind it, but he opened one eye when he felt her gaze on him and grinned back at her. She didn't bother closing the door, just grabbed a washcloth from one of his cabinets and began to clean herself up. After a minute, he padded into the bathroom behind her, turning on the shower, and when she spun to watch him step into the shower, a view she could never resist, he jerked his head, beckoning her. She joined him under the spray and moaned happily when his mouth sank down on hers, their tongues tangling as he traced his hands over her muscled midriff, down to her strong thighs, tugging at them suggestively.

“Again, already?” she teased, batting her wet eyelashes at him, and his eyes lit up impishly.

After, they lay in his bed, lying close enough that she could feel the heat he was throwing off, only a hair's breadth between their arms. Neither of them were big on cuddling but they liked to hang out on the nights they met up, usually getting down to the sex right away then watching TV or talking afterwards. Sometimes Sharon brought a report she hadn't finished, and Steve, who always finished his reports before heading off-duty, was content to read one of his many history books while she worked. Tonight, however, the television was on, and Steve peered down over his feet at it. Sharon wasn't watching.

“You hear from Barnes?” she asked, rolling onto her side to study him and propping her head up on one hand.

He nodded distractedly, his mouth twisting at something one of the Kardashian sisters was saying. “I don't get this at all,” he muttered.

“They're famous because they're famous, it's the next stage of human evolution. You're welcome, future generations. What did he say?”

He shook his head languidly. “Probably the same thing Lewis said. You pumping me for information?”

She groaned, and reached up to flick one of his perfect nipples.

“Hey!”

“Don't be an ass,” she scolded.

Steve sighed. “Sorry. He said they're fine, they made it to Jane's place okay, they're keeping the photostatic veils on whenever they're outside, everything's going great.”

“That's what she said, too.”

Finally he tore his eyes away from the seemingly meaningless argument happening on screen, peering up at her with brows drawn together. “You don't believe them?”

She collapsed back onto her stomach, her head turned towards him, and pouted. Steve took the cue, knowing all too well what she wanted, and pushed himself up, straddling her legs as he began to work out the stress-induced knots in her back. She hummed happily, eyes sliding shut. “I believe them. I just... I worry about Lewis. She's so smart, but she's... rash. Careless, sometimes.”

“Bucky's not like that,” he countered, kneading at a particularly gnarled, tense deltoid muscle. He slid his hands outwards, working on her upper arms.

“You're right,” she sighed. “How is he doing? After... everything?”

There was a long pause, just the rasp of Steve's calloused hands sliding across her skin, now making their way down to her trapezius muscles, now working on her lower back, and then her favorite part, his hands kneading her ass, thumbs pressing into her spine and fingers pressing into the muscles at her hips until she panted from the sensation. Finally, he murmured, “He's... getting there. It wasn't easy before, still isn't this time. Is she worried?”

He moved on to her hamstrings, and then her calves. He tapped the bottom of her right foot and she rolled over, reveling in the feel of his strong hands rolling the delicate bones of her feet between his fingers. “Yeah, Steve, she is. I wanted to,” she sighed, feeling more liquid than human as he kneaded her quadriceps, “I don't know, give her some reassurance. It's... hmph, whatever. It's childish, probably.”

“It's not,” he whispered, his hands on her hipbones, straddling her thighs. “You care about your friend. I know how that feels. Wish I had something you could tell her. But...”

She cut him off. “Yeah, I know. Alright, I'm good. Now you. On your belly, Cap.” He was half-hard again, and he arched an eyebrow at her but shrugged, doing as she commanded. She began to give him the same treatment, running her hands along the ridged and muscular plane of his back, pausing to grind the heel of her hands against the particularly tense muscles she found.

He let out a grunt that was practically sinful, and Sharon beamed at her victory. “How about Bruce and Natasha?”

Surprised, he asked, “How... what about them?”

“You think... you know. Something's happening on that little trip they're taking?”

Steve huffed. “This place is becoming more of a match-making service than the headquarters of an extra-governmental agency.”

Leaning down so each puff of air tickled the shell of his ear, she whispered, “Can't it be both?”

He'd flipped them so fast it took her breath away; between one blurred second and the next she was in an upended state of confusion, then she was flat on her back, and Steve was on her. He smiled, looking a little smug as he leaned in to graze her lips with his own. Then he withdrew, rolling back onto his side and hooking a leg between hers to take her with him.

“What about this?” he asked.

Sharon sighed. “This? You mean us? We're... shit, I don't know Steve. The sex is good, isn't it?”

He hummed an affirmative into her clavicle.

“And we like each other's company, spending time together?”

Again, he wordlessly agreed.

“Then, we're just...” He pulled back, watching her, resting his head on the folded arm beneath it as he waited for her to articulate what they were. “Seriously, feel free to jump in here any time Rogers. Because, uh, yeah. I don't really know. Sex buds?”

He wrinkled his nose at her in distaste. “Can I veto us ever using those words again? How about... lovers?”

“Gross, no. Veto to that too,” Sharon choked out.

“So...?”

“Look, I'm fine with us being friends who bump uglies-”

“Veto.”

Sharon grinned. “I'm fine with this just being a physical thing, but if you want to make a go of it as a couple, I'm game for that too. However, I'm a busy woman Steve, so if you're not sure let's just keep it casual.”

Steve's free hand slid around her waist, and he asked, “What about what you want? Do you want... uh, this? Me?”

“I'm here, aren't I?” She leaned in, nipping at his lower lip. “I wouldn't be if I wasn't.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?” she asked, peering up at him through her dark lashes.

“Yeah, let's give it a shot. Fair warning, I'm, uh... not good at this. Women. Romance. I don't know if I'll ever be a white picket fence, two and half kids kind of guy.”

Chuckling, she said, “That's good, because I find white picket fences to be horrifically impractical and I never really got the two and a half thing anyway... at some point you have to have that half a kid and make it three, right? Unless the idea is perpetual pregnancy. Because if that's the idea, I'd like to register my superveto now. I'm not even sure about pregnancy, let alone perpetual pregnancy.”

He sighed, pulling her up against him until he could gently take one nipple between his teeth, his warm tongue running over the delicate, puckered skin. A few minutes passed in pleasurable distraction, and then, “Fine by me. How about a goldfish, somewhere down the line?”

“Goldfish I might be able to handle,” Sharon gasped, threading her fingers through his silky golden hair and tugging lightly.

҉

#### Maryina Horka, Belarus

She parked on an unplowed street at the lonely outer edges of town, still covered in clean white snow, from which they could enter the forest that sprawled over the land to the south. They grabbed the bags of supplies they'd procured in Minsk and made towards the thick woods that could be seen between the buildings. As they were walking, she directed him to turn left down a small dead-end lane, and felt a moment of unease when a middle-aged woman surprised them, coming around the corner just as they were nearing it. She was obviously a cleaning lady of some sort, although she was completely bundled and wearing thick boots she had a bag full of supplies slung over one shoulder, and in each hand she carried an empty bucket. Nasha's faded recollection of superstitions, passed down to her by long-gone mother, screamed out at the sight.

She placed her hand on Bruce's lower back, steering him around the woman and averting her eyes. A woman with empty buckets was not bad luck, she was just a woman with empty buckets. She willed silent the ghosts of her childhood that were telling her otherwise.

They reached the edge of the woods quickly, and entered without fanfare. They made most of the two-hour trek quietly; the forest floor was covered with roots and dead leaves that warranted caution while walking. There was snow here and there, where the canopy above their heads thinned, but mostly everything was just muddy, or icy. She looked back at him periodically as she led the way, checking to see that his footing was sound. Each time she found him still behind her, one hand on a nearby tree trunk for balance and chuckling wryly at her concern.

Finally, the forest thinned and they came to a rolling valley sitting under a wide, open sky. The clouds hung low, white and benign but still blocked any rays of sun from shining on the seemingly forgotten space. Natasha could see multiple tracks from what looked like roving deer in the snow, but not a single human's footprints. In the distance was a dilapidated red brick building, comprised of a central, three-story building and two wings spreading off it to the east and west. Its roof was entirely caved in on the eastern side. Many of the windows were shattered and she could see, even from a distance, that the doors had been boarded shut.

“Is that what we came for?” Bruce asked softly. She nodded, her mind lost in the vision of what the building had looked like a few lifetimes ago. When she'd been brought here as a girl, just on the cusp of adolescence, so that she could properly begin her training.

The Red Room Academy.

She'd been, what, ten? Maybe eleven? 

She didn't have the strongest grasp of time after that terrible summer on the streets of Stalingrad. Madame B. had appeared first appeared in August. She'd reached out to Natasha when she'd seen her hanging around the back entrance to a bakery; she had entered the shop, emerging with two bags. She'd handed one to Natalia and walked away without a word. Inside had been two loaves of brown bread.

The next time had been at a bus stop that Natalia sometimes haunted, looking for dropped change. Madame B. had sat down on the metal bench inside the wooden shelter, and given her a small, tight smile. Remembering her and the charity she'd shown, Natalia had cautiously returned the smile. The neatly dressed blonde woman had held out her hand, opening it to reveal a palm full of change. Natalia had glanced around fearfully but ultimately been unable to resist the offer, and had snatched it from her quickly before fleeing.

After that, it had been glimpses here and there for a few weeks. She'd been so young, even then still so naive, and she had thought they were coincidences. Madame B. had always given her a small, secret smile, nodded at her, and continued on. Once she'd handed her a chocolate bar, and another time a pair of socks. Natalia had thought she seemed so kind. It wouldn't become clear to her until years later how well Leviathan and the Red Room had planned this, watching her throughout the summer and waiting until she was well and truly desperate, on the brink of collapse, then sending a maternal-looking woman to offer her those small tokens of kindness.

The last time Madame B. had appeared, it had been in the middle of the night, crouching beside her newspaper nest to shake Natalia awake. She'd whispered so softly, with such tenderness, that this was no way for her to live. That it was time for Natalia to come with her, to her new home. And truthfully, she hadn't had any fight left in her. So she'd taken the woman's hand, allowed her to pull her up from the rubble and the mire and deliver her into the hands of the Red Room, and eventually, the KGB.

“You still with me, Tasha?” Natasha was roused from her reverie, tearing her eyes from the collapsing remains of the Red Room Academy to look at Bruce's face, his brows knit with concern.

“Yeah, yes,” she said, “You ready to do this?” He pulled off the backpack he'd slung over his shoulders, unzipping it to check on the the sensitive contents within.

“Should I, uh, say something here? Like an action movie line? I was born ready, I thought you'd never ask, something like that?” He grinned sheepishly and Natasha shook off the last of the gloom that had sunk in at the sight of the place. She smirked, then rolled her eyes at him.

“Leave the one-liners to me, Bruce, and zip up that bag again so nothing falls out while we walk.” With that, she donned sunglasses she didn't really need and set off across the white field towards her former home.

The day had been September eighth. Her name day, and the day that, many decades later when the KGB had decided it was time for her to officially exist again, she would ask to have been born. Madame B. had not always been cruel or vindictive in the following years. She could show mercy, even a form of affection towards little Natalia, smaller than all the other girls for a while due to her summer of malnutrition, and Natalia in turn had flourished under her care and tutelage. Blossomed into the thing she had become, brilliant and beautiful and so very, very cold. How long it had taken her to thaw herself, and how much of herself she had lost in the intervening years, well... those were reasons for Natasha to keep fighting the good fight, if nothing else.

After they crawled into the abandoned, desolate building, she chose one of her old classrooms to mix the chemicals they'd gathered. She peered around the faded, peeling walls, once painted brightly with Disney characters, and when she kicked open a locked cupboard in the back of the room, she found a projector inside, a little tired-looking but otherwise exactly how she remembered it. Beside it lay a stack of film reels, the one on top labeled _Белоснежка и семь гномов_. She felt Bruce step behind her, looking at the outdated technology over her shoulder, and she croaked, “Snow White lies dead in the forest. The huntsman has brought me proof. Behold, her heart.”

His hand landed on her shoulder, a gentle warmth bleeding in through her jacket. “It's just a place, Natasha,” he said quietly.

She glanced back at him. “I've watched this film... hundreds of times, maybe. It was... part of the training. It helped us learn the American accent, and I think... I think they used it to influence us.”

“Brainwashing?” he asked.

Shrugging, she said, “I can't be sure. It's something Agent Carter mentioned once a while back, after a meeting, about the Red Room's brilliant use of propaganda. I never... I don't want to know, not now. It's too late to undo what was done, anyway.” She spun to face him. His eyes were dark and he watched her like a hawk as she laid out the materials they'd need to make the nitroglycerin on the small child-sized desks. Her hands shook slightly as they worked, carefully measuring each component on a scale she'd bought. They worked together in that way, her gradually regaining her composure and him still eyeing her like she was made of spun glass, mindful that she might break at any moment.

Natasha knew she would not break, that nothing could break her now, but she did not rob him of his disillusion. It may have been wrong, it may have been taking advantage, but god damn it, his concern felt like love and today of all days, she would take it, if that was the best she would ever get.

It took them another two hours to carefully place the bundles they'd made at strategic points around the building, and they checked the wires connecting everything twice before climbing back out the window and carefully unfurling the remaining wires as they backed as far away from the building as possible, ending up at the edge of the trees, a few hundred feet away.

“You know, I'm not sure we did this properly,” he told her, as he watched her fiddle with the remote detonation switch.

“We didn't. This kind of thing takes months, usually. This is probably going to be messy, and... it's not my area of expertise. I'm guessing it'll be part implosion, part structural fire,” she mused.

Bruce grinned at her crookedly. “Sounds like a pretty fitting end to me.” His hand was resting on her shoulder again, and she leaned into it, allowing him to slide his arm across her back and pull her closer.

She felt the corners of her mouth pulling up before she could stop them, incapable of resisting his kindness, and she shifted, looking back at the building. This is for you, Pasha, and you, Helena, she thought. Then she flipped the first switch.

The light was already failing, the afternoon gliding quickly into darkness, and so it was difficult to see the effects of the first round of detonations, although they could hear them. A was a great cloud of dust billowing out of the broken windows of the first floor, accompanied the sound of exploding brick and mortar. Natasha flipped the second and the third switch simultaneously, and all at once the building groaned, then roared, then with a whoosh, two thirds of it collapsed. Bruce quirked an eyebrow at her, gesturing towards the still standing western wing, and Natasha shrugged. The flames appeared a moment later, first merely licking at the wooden window sills and then growing, spreading upwards, floor to floor and room to room. Soon the entire wing was consumed, a brilliant burning inferno in the dark winter afternoon.

She watched it all without breaking, without tears or any external sign of emotion. Madame B. would have been proud of how stoically she destroyed the place that had housed her, that had held her, the place that seen her grow into the spy they had wanted her to be. She turned to Bruce, who was watching the fire spread, his jaw hanging open slightly.

“That's... I mean, wow. I've never purposefully done anything so destructive when I wasn't, you know, green,” he wheezed.

“How's it feel?”

“Uh, yeah. Well. Weird? Kind of a rush, if I'm being honest. Which... I have this, I don't know, this feeling like I should be with you. I feel like... you won't judge me.” He looked down at her, his eyes crinkling.

“I won't,” she whispered, then leaned her head against the side of his chest, still tucked under his arm. _The Victim of the Sleeping Death can be revived only by Love's First Kiss_ , the evil queen's velveteen purr echoed in her memories. But no, that was a silly idea. A Disney movie, Natasha? Still, what if, just this once, she let herself have what she really wanted? If Barnes could find peace and someone to love him, someone to absolve him...

She looked up at Bruce's handsome, careworn face. There was a few days worth of dark stubble covering his cheeks and jawline, and she thought it made him look slightly rugged. A little wild. A little sexy. “This would be an excellent time to kiss me, Bruce,” she murmured.

She felt him jump with surprise, although his hand never left her far shoulder, in fact his hold on her seemed to tighten as he stared down at her, shocked. His mouth was hanging open, even farther now, and she pushed it closed with her pinkie finger. He glanced at the fire, then back at her. “You want... are you sure...?” he stuttered.

“Very sure,” she said, nodding.

So he kissed her. It was exactly how she thought it would be, warm and sweet and like waking up from a dark, cold dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, I know nothing about explosives so I did my best with internet research (aka Wikipedia). If I messed it up, please suspend your disbelief!


	4. carotid

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “So here we are once more in the wilds, and once more we've come upon some out of the way corner. But what a wilderness, and what an out of the way corner!”
> 
> ######  _Dead Souls_ , Nikolai Gogol

#### Minsk, Belarus

Bruce was whistling in the shower. Natasha silently willed him to stop from her cozy position under the hotel bed's sheets, but he didn't receive her psychic message. She craned her neck to listen, and smiled despite herself when she caught the tune. It was the seven dwarves' ode to the Puritan work ethic, 'Heigh Ho'. She knew what her mother would have said, how she would have fretted about the cosmic peril of whistling indoors, but she found herself charmed anyway. What a sweet man she'd caught in her web, this time.

So unlike the first man she'd caught, that tortured soul that she'd been paired with for the Brazilian operation, joined in fake matrimony while they worked to destabilize the democratically elected pro-American regime. _Timur_. Living together in a small flat in São Paolo, Natasha herself barely out of her teens and certainly not yet the seasoned agent she would become... was it any surprise that she'd come to love the mysterious, brooding Timur? Still so young, yet already amassing her army of secrets. She looked back almost fondly at that time in her life, when she'd thought that the worst agony she'd have to endure would be falling in love with the man she'd been assigned to emulate loving.

How terribly it all had ended.

“Saved you some hot water,” Bruce said, his dark curls plastered to his face as he stuck his head out of the bathroom door-frame, grinning at her.

She smiled in turn, her face relaxing into a look that might reasonably be called soft. He brought that out in her, the desire for kindness. He disappeared, although the door remained open, and she could hear him pulling on a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt. He emerged a moment later, hesitating between the two beds.

“I'll shower later,” she murmured, “Will you come warm me up?” He nodded readily, pulling back the sheets and joining her, his warm stocky frame welcome beside her in the frigid room. The woman at the front desk had warned them that the heat was on the fritz, but neither of them had felt like looking for another hotel after the long trek out of the woods and the hour of driving back to Minsk. They'd taken the key and promised not to call down with any complaints about the temperature.

He laid his head beside hers on the pillow, gently lacing her slim fingers through his. Natasha listened for his heartbeat: it was calm, steady, nothing for concern. It seemed this much contact was safe for him.

“Tasha, about that kiss...” he started.

She glanced up at him through her eyelashes, and ascertained at once that he was unsure how to proceed. Sighing, she said, “It's okay, Bruce. It was... I needed that, from you. I hope you don't mind.” The last bit was offered ironically, with a sly smirk.

“I _really_ didn't, or, uh, I don't,” he said. “Just let me know if you need any more physical comfort. I'm here for, well, whatever you need. That place was...”

“Depressing?”

He shuddered. “Yeah, intensely so. Will we be burning down any more Red Rooms?”

She shook her head. “The other facilities are all gone, according to my research. Or moved so far underground even I couldn't sniff them out. Either way, that was the last from my own personal history. It's obvious it wasn't in use anymore, but it's odd that no one cared if it just sat there until the end of time.”

“Except you,” he murmured, alert and observant.

“Except me,” she agreed, turning her head to stare into his large, dark eyes. He looked besotted, she thought. She recognized that expression; she'd caused it to bloom across the faces of quite a few men. She liked it on Bruce, but there was an underpinning worry to her growing affection. Was she still playing games? She'd been playing them for so long, sometimes even Natasha thought it was difficult to know what she felt and what she wanted others to think she felt.

No, Alianovna, she reprimanded. Be present. Bruce was still watching her, so she reached up with her unclaimed hand and ruffled his damp, grey-threaded curls, smiling ruefully. He sighed, relieved.

From the nightstand beside the bed, her Starkphone dinged loudly in the ensuing lull. “Hand me it?” she requested, and he did. She unlocked the welcome screen, then read the message, her lips twitching as she fought back a smile.

“Share with the class?” he asked, his eyebrows raised hopefully.

She passed the phone to him. “Darcy has been sending me texts; a different Russian cryptid every day in the hopes that I would set aside some time to research at least one of them for her. So far I haven't said yes and I haven't said no... I like getting the updates from her, if she's well enough to send me texts then I know she's doing fine. This one, though...”

“The Brosno dragon,” Bruce read from the text. “Where's that?”

“About a day's drive from here, I think. Western Russia. My... parents used to joke about it sometimes. They used to say that bad children from Stalingrad would be sent to feed the Brosnya as punishment.”

Bruce scrolled up, looking at the other supernatural creatures Darcy had spammed Natasha with, then returned to the dragon. Finally, in a soft voice, he said, “We should go.”

She grimaced at that. “Really, Bruce? Not you, too.”

“No, seriously. We should. It's only a couple days' detour, we still have our fake identification, why not? It'll send Darcy over the moon and that kid could use a win. Plus, I like the intellectual challenge of it. And, uh... spending time with you.”

She buried her face the pillow, laughing quietly to herself. What had her life even come to? On the run with the Hulk, bringing back from the dead a life she'd come close to successfully erasing, and now dragon-hunting in the wilds of the former USSR? She glanced up at him, he was wearing an earnest smile and his eyes were warm, cheerful, lit with humor.

Natasha groaned. “I'm the last sane Avenger, aren't I?”

“Maybe,” Bruce answered thoughtfully, “But there's still time for you to go weird in the brain, and plenty of room over here with all of us nutjobs.”

She smiled coyly, sliding her hand across the soft cotton t-shirt covering his chest. “What the hell? I called myself a mushroom, time to jump in the basket.”

҉

#### Inverness, Scotland

“Okay, so, lessons learned so far. Deep fried Mars Bars are much better in theory than execution. British television is alarmingly comfortable with nudity. Haggis is a monstrosity that should be stricken from the face of the earth. Nessie is one fickle bitch, although I'm not giving up hope yet. Am I forgetting anything?” Darcy glanced over at Bucky, bundled in his coat and gloves in the Adirondack chair next to hers, then returned her gaze to the thick fog that had rolled in around them.

He smiled faintly, watching the water gently lap at the pebbly beach a few feet downhill from the resort's wide wooden deck. He took another sip of his beer, then gave her his attention. “Hmm. The Scots will judge you for renting scuba gear, especially if you tell them you're looking for Nessie, although you'll sort of win them back if you tell them you have a Scottish name and heritage. And agree to buy them a round at the pub.”

“Good points,” she gestured using the hand holding a hot toddy, “Here's another one: don't go monster hunting in Scotland in the middle of winter. It's a foggy, rainy dystopia. I am shocked, literally shocked, that it's not raining today.” She burrowed deeper under the fleece blanket she'd brought out onto the deck with her, and glanced longingly at the golden glow emanating from the resort's windows. The place was so homey, full of overstuffed couches and dark, cozy rooms with large fireplaces; she couldn't have dreamed up a better place to whisk Bucky away to. Five more minutes, she promised herself, then they could say that they tried and they could head back inside to get warm.

“I hate to admit it, but traveling on Tony Stark's dime is a lot better than all that camping and motel squatting we were doin' in the states,” Bucky added. “This place is obscene. I feel like a Rockefeller.”

Darcy stuck out her lower lip in mock offense. “How dare you disparage Bobby like that, dude! Bobby housed you on many a cold and stormy night before dying a noble death in battle with the STRIKE team.”

“Yeah, darlin', the Pinzgauer was a great vehicle, but it doesn't really hold a candle to a five-star resort, now does it?” he asked, grinning.

She sighed and took a healthy swallow of her whiskey-laced tea, finally cool enough to drink. “So...” she started. “It's way too foggy to go Nessie-hunting today. Even _I_ am not that masochistic. What're we gonna do with all this free time we have, huh? We should go look at a castle, I suppo-o-o-o-se...”

He snorted, finishing off his beer. “Angel, we're on vacation. There's no 'should' anything. Just whatever we want.”

“So... no castle?”

He quirked an eyebrow at her, tilting his head and smirking suggestively.

“Yeah, no. No castle. Bedroom?”

At that Bucky's grin turned wolfish and he stood, offering his hand to her. She placed the toddy in it instead and sprung up from her chair, stretching. While her arms were still flung back behind her head, her eyes slid towards him, catching him leering at her ample chest. “See something you like, sarge?” she asked in a singsong voice.

“You know I do,” he grunted.

She winked, then turned and darted off for the door. “Better come get it!” she shouted, before pulling it open and disappearing inside. Bucky sighed, and made to follow at a leisurely pace, his heavy boots stomping across the damp boards. No way was he running around this place like some kind of love-sick fool, even if he was.

Her head reappeared from behind the door, frowning at him. “Bucky?” she asked, sounding a little put out.

That he could not accept. “I'm getting us another drink from the bar, Darcy. And when I have those drinks, I'm coming up to our room. And when I get to our room, I want you on the bed. Without clothes. Ready for me. You understand?”

She cackled giddily at that command, giving him a loopy salute before pivoting on her heel and taking the carpeted stairs up to their room two at a time.

God, how he loved his girl.

҉

#### Andreapol, Russia, somewhere along 29H-0007

She'd been able to answer every last lingering question she'd had once Russia entered the digital revolution, of course. Documents that had been securely filed away in unremarkable buildings in the heart of Siberia, behind concrete walls and security cameras and stone-faced guards, had over the course of a few years been scanned and entered into databases, protected by nothing more than some rudimentary firewalls and encryption software. Easily breakable for a quick study like Natasha, who had taught herself BASIC in the early days of home-computing and made it a point of pride to stay abreast of the developing programming languages, advances in software and hardware, the evolving industry of internet security and its amorphous, shadowy twin, hacking. How easy it'd become to find whatever she wanted, when naive governments began to trust the invisible more than the tangible.

Like a kid in a candy store, she'd eagerly devoured every scrap of information about her father that she could get her hands on, and just like a greedy, foolish child she had made herself so sick, down to her very soul, by the time she'd finished.

Pasha's stress had come from the increasing demands of the state, as she'd long suspected, but it had also come from Leviathan's increasingly insistent overtures. The espionage agency had wanted him to join the team, fight for Mother Russia. Their foresight had been impeccable; although the Cold War had started as small disagreements, minute hostile acts between superpowers, it had quickly spun itself out into the sprawling, paranoiac global conflict of the next few decades, and Leviathan had seen it all coming. They'd known how valuable an asset like Pasha would be in that conflict, and they'd wanted him to be their man. His English had been good, and with a little training could have been even better, and he'd had a nice family who could have blended easily into some community somewhere in western Europe, maybe even America.

But he'd said no, that he wanted to return home to that nice family, that he didn't want to march for their cause. And that had been the last thing he'd ever said.

Natasha's grip on the truck's steering wheel tightened, her leather gloves creaking, and she glanced at Bruce. He was fast asleep, his head bobbing as the vehicle passed over the lonely forest highway's many potholes. She shifted in her seat, trying not to think about Leviathan. Or Pasha.

Or Helena. Her mother, the one loose end that she had never been able to tie off. Every file she'd dug up, every ex-Leviathan operative she'd quietly interrogated, all those lost years of secretly searching between missions, and she'd never heard even a whisper of where her mother had gone or what had happened to her. Perhaps she was simply lost to history, her body resting in an unmarked grave in the woods surrounding Stalingrad. Perhaps she'd lived out her days in a gulag, undocumented and forgotten by all except Natasha. Perhaps she'd escaped. What did it matter, now? There was very little chance she was still alive, even if she had somehow outlived Leviathan, the Stalinist purges, Perestroika, the rise of the oligarchs, any of it.

The files had also told her everything she might have otherwise willed herself to forget about her self. What a surreal moment it had been, to be sitting in a hotel room in 2006 and reading the minutiae of every last desperate choice she'd made in that wretched summer of 1944. The writing had been so clinical, yet so detailed, observing each of her actions in the main body of the report and in the footnotes, conjecturing (with an accuracy that dismayed her) about her motivations. She'd been a mere child, clever and agile but still easy to follow and easy to manipulate into the hands of the Red Room.

Easy to mold, once they had her.

Their route narrowed from paved one-lane highway to simple dirt road, still treacherously blanketed with flattened snow and a layer of ice, so Natasha slowed the truck to a crawl as she drove them farther from civilization, towards the lake. They passed two signs declaring they were passing through the settlements of Рахново, then Гущино, although she could not see a single living thing anywhere, just trees and snow and ice. The change in momentum roused Bruce and he stretched, yawning, for a long moment, before peering out the window at the soaring, stoic pines hemming them in on the narrow road. 

“We almost there?” He rubbed his face, pulling his glasses off to clean them on the cotton t-shirt under his sweater.

“I... think so,” Natasha said, not entirely sure herself. The locals in Andreapol had directed her towards this road, and according to her GPS they were almost on top of the lake. That's all she had to go by; she was doing her best impression of Darcy's devil-may-care attitude, although she felt her results were somewhat mixed. “This road ends a quarter mile up ahead,” she added, passing the SI satphone she'd been cradling in her lap to Bruce.

He glanced at the screen then nodded, scratching at his grey-flecked stubble. “Let me guess, from there we go on foot?” He smiled sleepily.

“Look at you, putting those famous smarts to good use,” she answered, shooting him a crooked half-smile.

҉

#### Inverness, Scotland

He looked so peaceful wrapped up in the sheets, his long dark hair obscuring half of his handsome face, his metal hand relaxed where it lay on the pillow, his chest rising and falling evenly. Darcy thought back to the last time she'd seen him sleep so soundly... it had been while they were still on the road, holing up for a few days of recovery in a motel somewhere after they left the madness of New Orleans and the Loup Garou behind.

She leaned against the doorjamb of their suite's bathroom, taking a moment to revel in her correct choice of bringing Bucky on vacation for some much-needed rest and relaxation. It felt like this thing between them had started so small, then collected mass and momentum as it hurtled into a full-blown relationship, and she still occasionally wondered if she was _really_ up to the task of loving a man as complicated as Sergeant James Barnes. Not that she'd ever spurn the opportunity she'd been given. They were the real deal, she'd decided that in a small cottage in Vermont while on the hunt for a different lake monster, and she'd never looked back.

But mind control, again? She hadn't been ready for that nasty curve-ball. Now, though, they were getting back to where they'd been before Loki, before Manhattan. She just needed to be patient, she knew that. She needed to give him time, time to rest and time to heal.

Which probably included letting him sleep even though the first light had revealed a shockingly clear, crisp morning outside their window. It was going to be a beautiful day, and Darcy was itching to go walk along the banks of Loch Ness, just to see if she could, well, see anything.

She'd let him sleep. She wouldn't be gone long, and she'd probably be back before he even woke. She'd bring him coffee, maybe even talk him into renting a rowboat, although he'd vehemently nixed that idea when she'd brought it up a few days ago.

There'd be time to discuss it later, anyway. When she got back from her walk. She smiled, contentment licking at her insides like a low-burning fire as she leaned over to kiss him gently where his hairline met his temple. She spun, grabbing her coat and bag then tip-toeing out of of the suite, employing some of Natasha's lessons in stealthiness when she carefully shut the door behind her.

҉

#### Ozero Brosno, Russia

“It's, uh, frozen.”

Natasha's lips twisted slightly into a moue while she contemplated. She observed that the lightly snow-dusted ice, which looked to be an inch thick or so and only covered a six foot swath of water, ran around the entire shoreline for as far as either of them could see in either direction. The lake was surrounded by more gigantic pines, also buried under thick white coats. Inside the ring of ice, the dark water of the lake reflected the grey sky that hung heavy up above them, and the surface was preternaturally still, leading to the feeling that the whole world around them was asleep.

“Not entirely frozen,” she murmured at last, “Just the shoreline.”

From somewhere within the trees behind her Bruce chuckled, emerging with a fallen branch. He edged close enough to the water that he could poke at the ice foot, whose edges dipped below the water as soon as he touched it.

“So now we wait?” he asked, shifting from foot to foot in the snow and arching an eyebrow at her. She shrugged.

“I asked Darcy for instructions on how exactly one entices a mythical Russian dragon into revealing itself. She suggested scuba diving, but I've decided against it on the basis that I don't care that much and I'm not getting in that water unless my life depends upon it.”

“What'd the locals say, when you asked?” he asked, surveying their surroundings for a snow-free surface where he could sit.

“Half of them said it's not real, that it's just a giant fish or a mutant beaver. Or a hydrogen sulfide geyser in the lake bed that makes the water boil. I like that one,” she paused, smiling archly as her eyes scanned the mirror-like surface for disruptions, “The other half, they actually _did_ think it's a dragon. I got the sense they don't like outsiders poking at it, they weren't exactly helpful.”

“Hmm,” said Bruce, staring out across the glassy water. “Too bad we can't just drain the lake, or dredge it.”

“Apparently it's one of the deepest lakes in Europe, aaand...” Natasha trailed off, turning to her right and walking along the shore.

“Tasha?” Bruce asked, following in her footsteps.

“They told me there's an old submerged church beneath the lake, on the western side,” she said distractedly. “Too bad the water isn't clearer.”

“Wouldn't make it a very hospitable home for a dragon, though, would it?” She shot him a sharp look and noticed he was grinning, clearly trying to repress his mirth at the situation they'd found themselves in.

She huffed softly, turning from him to study the lake again. “I should've brought Stark's toys with me,” she muttered resignedly.

“So, scuba gear?” Now Bruce was outright giggling, and he looked so handsome when he did, his eyes crinkling and his full lips gaping to reveal a mouth full of straight white teeth. She smiled, just a little, one small corner of her mouth, and was about to respond with something snarky when her phone rang.

So she settled for rolling her eyes at him while pulling her phone from her coat pocket. “Romanoff.” She listened for a long moment, the humor in her eyes dying as her breathing slowed, her expression sobered, and her body stiffened. She nodded silently a few times, offered an “I see” or a “copy” but not much else. Finally, the person on the other end of the line seemed to be finished speaking, and Natasha tore her eyes from the forest, the lake, the snow, her green eyes blazing furiously when they met Bruce's wary gaze. “I understand,” she ground out, “and we're on our way.”

She jerked her head, already marching back towards the truck, sliding into the driver's seat before Bruce had even reached the passenger door. He climbed in beside her, glancing at her nervously.

“That was Steve. We have to go,” she muttered. Everything about her restrained anger screamed emergency, and he could feel his blood pressure starting to rise. He took several deep, calming breaths and Natasha glanced at him anxiously before starting the truck and navigating them back the way they came.

For a few minutes there was only tense, uncomfortable silence save for the sound of Bruce's breathing and the car sliding over flattened snow. Natasha waited patiently while Bruce reigned in his unfurling panic. Finally, he felt calm enough to speak to her in a low, measured voice. “I'm okay.”

She nodded, and reached out to squeeze his forearm. “Good. Sorry to cut short our fun.”

“What is it?” he asked, still employing the pranayama breathing technique to keep himself steady.

He could see her hesitation. “Bruce... maybe I should just drop you off somewhere,” she demurred. “I'll get you to an airport.”

Bruce shook his head adamantly. “No... no, Tasha. I'm okay. Tell me.”

She swallowed heavily, her plush lips turning pale, pressed into an angry line. She unconsciously began to mimic Bruce's breathing. Finally, she spoke.

“Barnes called Steve this morning, because... Darcy was missing.”

He tilted his head, waiting for the rest of it. She peeked at him again, not bothering to hide that she was checking his emotional state. He gestured for her to continue.

“He received a message about an hour ago. It's from a cell of the Ten Rings, apparently working out of a base in northern Scotland. They said they have her, and they'll give her back to us unharmed... in return for Iron Man.”


	5. atria

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one he loves.”
> 
> ######  _The Master and Margarita_ , Mikhail Bulgakov

#### S.H.I.E.L.D. Quinjet, somewhere above northern England

“Bayu-bayushki-bayu,” her mother used to sing faintly under her breath, resting on the edge of the spy's childhood bed as she ran her fingers through her daughter's shining, vermilion curls, “Ne lozhisya na krayu, priydet seren'kmy volchok, i ukusit za bochok!” 

Natasha smiled softly. It was a quiet, reverent memory that she'd held onto throughout the hard years which had followed. Bruce glanced over from his cockpit seat, to the left of hers. He leaned towards her side of the controls but seeing nothing of note on the digital instruments, his left eyebrow ticked up towards his hairline.

“An old memory,” she murmured, shaking her head. Bruce shrugged, and made to turn away, which caused something in Natasha to recoil. She pushed herself to explain, although she hadn't planned to. “A lullaby. Sleep, sleep, sleep. Don't lie close to the bed side, otherwise a grey wolf will come and bite you. The translation doesn't really do it justice, but you get the gist.”

He grimaced slightly. “People sing that to their kids? Geez.”

“I don't know. It's no better or worse than threats of the boogie man... the goal is sleep, not sweet dreams.” 

He nodded silently at that, then from the corner of his eyes stole a furtive glance back at Steve, Sharon and Tony, sitting stone-faced and mute in their seats. They'd picked Natasha and Bruce up in the suburbs of London that morning on an empty, frost-covered football field save for one little boy who stood transfixed while the jet landed and the pair, who'd been waiting quietly in the stands, hurried aboard.

Natasha had, upon seeing Tony and Steve's wan faces, immediately insisted on taking over as pilot, and she hadn't received much of a fight. Exhausted, anxious silence reigned in the pressurized interior of the jet.

“A lot of lullabies are kind of deranged, if you think about the actual words. I'll bribe you to sleep with a diamond ring? Rock-a-bye baby, oops I put your cradle on a fragile tree branch on a windy day? Weird,” Bruce said in a low, conversational tone.

“What would you prefer,” she teased, “Go the fuck to sleep?”

Grinning, he shook his head. “Little too abrasive for my tastes. Maybe just... something nice. Neutral. Hello small human, probably time to hit the hay, the sun, it's uh...”

“Gettin' real low?” Natasha asked sardonically in an exaggerated southern drawl. He gave her an abashed look, and although she shifted her attention back to navigating the Quinjet, her expression softened. “...Hey big guy, sun's getting real low.”

“Now see, when you say it like that, with that husky voice of yours,” he mumbled, high color splashing across the back of his neck and cheeks, “I think it'd pretty much knock me out... any time, any place.”

“Good to know,” she purred, smirking, her eyes flitting over the endless azure sky around them and the white blanket of clouds rushing past down below.

҉

#### Inverness, Scotland

“So,” Tony began, cutting the tightly-strung tension in the disarrayed resort suite, “I've been following the Little Intern That Could's signal, from the hidden tracking device in the bracelet I gave her when she joined up with us. Don't give me that look, Carter-”

“I didn't say anything,” Sharon replied in a neutral tone, shrugging. “That girl is a magnet for trouble. It's probably for the best you did what you did, at least until she's finished her training.”

“Maybe even then,” Bruce added, wincing.

Tony blew out a frustrated puff of air, and resumed his pacing as he spoke to the pair plus Natasha, who was studying the photos Darcy had taken on her digital camera in the past week. “Anyway. Jarvis has been tracking her, but they were moving nonstop across Scotland all night, until they switched to aircraft about an hour ago. Wasn't sure a roadside ambush or a Quinjet dogfight was the best way to spring her but it looks like they've finally settled in one place, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say it's probably their base of operations.”

He pulled out his phone, tapping a few icons on the screen until it began to project a map of Scotland onto the far wall. He placed the phone on the bed, then pointed to the blinking red dot that flashed out, unmoving, at the top left-hand side of the country. “There. That's where she is.”

“And there is...?” Natasha asked, putting the camera down and inspecting the projection.

Tony grinned widely at some private joke. "It's, uh, a lighthouse. The name..."

“What?” Sharon snapped. “I don't really think this is funny, Stark.”

He shook his head. “Course not. I know it isn't. But look, the bracelet also monitors her vital signals. She's fine. It's a nice little piece of gadgetry, actually, I'm pretty pleased with how it-”

“Tony.” Bruce's brows were drawn together, and he shook his head in admonishment. “Focus.”

At that Tony sighed, leaning back against the elegant armchair sitting in front of the suite's vanity table. “Uh, rude? Fine. We'll move on. Jarvis, zoom in on Lewis's signal.”

The projection blurred for a moment, enhancing and focusing until it was showing them a long archipelago of islands that skirted the northwestern side of Scotland. The red dot sat, still blinking, at the very northernmost tip of the northernmost island. “Sir, this is the map view of Agent Lewis's location, on the Western Isles. Shall I enhance and switch to the three-dimensional view, or switch to the satellite view?”

“Enhance, Jarvis. Get us as good of a tactical vantage point for an ambush as possible,” Sharon answered tersely, before Tony could. He shot her an indignant pout and she raised an eyebrow defiantly, from which he quickly averted his gaze back to the image before them. Ever since learning from Pepper how much Tony had loved her aunt, and that he was a little afraid of her, they'd been building a friendship of sorts. She was still as no-nonsense as ever with him though, especially in tense times like these. And Tony was usually quick to acquiesce to her sounder judgment.

The projection blurred and shifted to the air above the phone, the light from the small device beaming out a fully three-dimensional, one hundred and eighty degree panorama. They were immersed in the image of a rocky, grassy headland surrounding a red brick tower, which had a glass room on top that was supported by a framework of black iron bars. The only other visible sign of humanity on the desolate, windswept coastal land was a squat white building sitting next to the tower.

“Is that... a lighthouse? Seriously? Could they be any more cliché?” Bruce asked, his lip curling.

Tony stifled another smirk. “So, what's the plan, Fury's angels? Go in guns a-blazing? Send in the Hulk?”

“Hey!” Bruce objected.

“What? He gets the job done, right? Anyone else remember that time he played whack-a-mole with Loki? 'Cause I do.”

“Those guns might be a little too blazing,” Natasha murmured, “Same problem as fighting them in the air, we could end up defeating the main objective of the mission, retrieving Darcy Lewis alive. I think we need an element of surprise, which may be difficult under these circumstances. Tony, contact them and tell them you're willing to negotiate a hostage exchange. Tell them Agent Carter and Captain America are going to escort you to their location and deliver you to the them tonight, those are your conditions for surrender. If this is their base they'll be guarding the island closely, so Bucky, Bruce and I will land the Quinjet on an island to the south... this one, here. Scarp. We'll take a dinghy across the water and go on foot from there to the base while you're dealing with whoever comes to collect you. Hopefully that divides their manpower enough to make them manageable.”

“You really think Barnes is going to be in any shape to fight? Guy looked like a zombie when we got here,” Tony said, crossing his arms as he glanced out at the balcony where Steve and Bucky had been standing for the past half hour, leaning on the railing. Their broad, muscled backs and the disparately colored backs of their heads gave no indication to whether they were even speaking, and if they were, what the topic might be.

“He _was_ basically catatonic, Romanoff,” Sharon added, agreeing with Tony's observation.

Shaking her head, Natasha did not lift her eyes from the projection. She stuck one finger out, poking at the image curiously. She smiled wryly when the perspective of the image shifted, as though they had moved across the wide headland to take in the brick lighthouse, the cliffs and the wild sea behind it from a different angle. “I don't know. We just have to hope that Steve can talk him down and get him back on the same page as everyone else.”

“The one where Darcy is fine and not dead and this is not his fault,” Bruce clarified.

“Yes. That one,” Natasha sighed. 

Tony was still stifling a small smirk and when Sharon noticed it, she barked out, “Alright, what is it Stark? What the hell is so funny about this situation?”

“No, no, nothing. I think Romanoff's right, distraction and surprise are our best chances, yadda yadda. It's, uh," he huffed softly with bemusement, "...the lighthouse. Where she's being kept. Jarvis, tell 'em the name.”

“Of course, sir. Agent Lewis is currently being detained in the Butt of Lewis lighthouse.”

Tony's grin grew wider, now unable to restrain his chuckling, and Sharon snorted in disbelief, turning on her heels and exiting the room with the stated intention of gathering supplies from the jet, landed nearby. Natasha rolled her eyes, muttering, “The last sane Avenger.” Bruce heard her, despite her sotto voce, and nodded placidly in agreement when their eyes met.

҉

“Talk to me, Buck,” Steve said quietly, forearms on the weathered railing, staring out at the deep blue waters of Loch Ness, rippled by the breeze that skipped across it and teased at the men's hair.

Bucky shrugged, his eyes also trained on the scene before them, and remained mute. Still. Better than an hour ago when they'd arrived at the resort, and he hadn't responded to a thing they'd said, staring into the middle distance with the glazed look of a hypnotist's mark. He'd obviously torn apart the room before they got there, smashed splinters of furniture strewn forlorn and ruined across the gleaming hardwood floors.

“Can't think of a damn thing worth saying,” he croaked, at last.

“You heard what they said in there, didn't you?” Steve asked. He knew the serum Bucky had received was different than his own, but he also knew his friend's senses were still very sharp. Even with the low sussurus of wind all around them, it was easy to overhear the conversation their fellow Avengers were carrying on inside.

“They came for her, and I couldn't...” Bucky trailed off, shrugging again.

“Hold up, pal. By they, you mean Ten Rings. Not HYDRA, not Strike, not Pierce. This ain't about you, and they just picked her because, well... don't take this wrong way, but she's the easiest one to get at, out of all of us. And she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But this is about Stark, about their grudge with him. Not you. Bucky. Are you hearing me? It isn't about you. It's not even about her.” He'd finished talking, was leaning on his right elbow so that he could peer at the profile of his oldest friend, searching for some sign of understanding.

“Shoulda been out walkin' with her.”

“Maybe so, but she snuck out of here. Probably wanted to let you sleep, the kid's been worried about you. We all have.” Steve continued his perusal, willing him to look away from the rolling hills and body of water before them. “Bucky.”

“I hear you, Steve,” Bucky said quietly, glancing down at his metallic left hand, balled into a fist and resting in the fleshy palm of his right. “I know it's been hard for her, with me... she shouldn't haveta put up with that, but she does. Maybe I should let her go find somebody normal, but I can't. And maybe she's okay right now. Or maybe these Ten Rings asshole are smarter than Stark, and found some way to rig that bracelet of hers.”

“Only one way to find that out for sure, Buck.” Steve ran a hand through his blond hair, his blue eyes tiredly shifting back to the lake as he accepted that the man didn't want to look at him.

“I'm not sure I can do this, if she's dead...” he muttered, letting his eyes droop closed as he leaned his elbows on the railing, his head hanging down between his arms.

“I... I... Jesus, pal. I don't know what to say,” Steve fidgeted slightly, wanting to reach out and pull Bucky in for a hug but holding himself in check, “Can't you... let's not jump the gun here. Let's go to this damn lighthouse, do it Nat's way because it's a smart plan, and get her out if she's there.”

“And if she's... not?” His voiced wavered and cracked, ever so slightly.

“We'll do what we do, Buck. We'll avenge her.”

҉

#### Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Scotland

Darcy was halfway to saving herself by the time Bucky, Natasha, and Bruce reached the Butt of Lewis Lighthouse.

After skulking across the island and silently taking out the guards who'd been stationed around the perimeter of the Ten Rings facility, they'd filed into the lighthouse only to find her gone, and the two guards who had obviously been assigned to watch her lying in an incapacitated heap just inside the entrance. A burst of gunfire came from far above their heads and outside.

Bucky raced on ahead of her, rapidly scaling the spiraling stairs that traced the inner walls of the structure, with Natasha trailing close behind. They raced up through the watch room, past the service room, before bursting out of the doorway onto the gallery deck, a catwalk which ringed itself around the circumference of the lighthouse. Still the sound of Darcy's weapon rang out from higher up, so Bucky scrambled up the ladder fixed to the exterior wall of the lighthouse which rose up from the gallery deck to a second tier, the widow's walk, leaving Natasha to cover him from the return fire from below. 

He found her leaning against the window of the long-dark lantern room where the beacon sat gathering dust. She was carefully picking off approaching Ten Rings operatives on the ground below. She beamed beatifically at Bucky when his head burst through the hole in the widow's walk floor.

Uncocking the Tellor Propellant Rifle she'd pulled from one of her now unconscious sentries, she crawled over to fling her arms around Bucky's neck before he could even push himself up onto the floor of the catwalk with her.

“Boy am I glad to see you, handsome,” she breathed happily against his neck, and she felt a desperate shudder wrack Bucky's body. She frowned, pulling back to really study his face. “Hey sarge, I'm okay. I brought my taser on my walk, like we talked about. Took down two guys with it before they knocked me out. And I was wearing Tony's tracking device, which Pepper gave me the scoop on but don't tell him, 'cause he thinks I don't know, the sneaky bastard. And it seems like you guys found me easy enough. It's all gravy, baby.” Her tone had a forced lightheartedness to it, and although she smiled readily at him he saw her hands were shaking slightly.

He nodded silently, then wrapped his arms around her waist as he dragged her back down the two ladders with him and into the watch room. Outside Natasha picked off the black-clad mercenaries who were shooting at them, and the sound of bullets ricocheting uselessly off of Steve's shield could be heard in the distance, accompanied by the high-pitched whine of Iron Man's repulsors being fired and Sharon's gun firing on the members they'd sent to meet the trio.

Through all of this short-lived scuffle, Bucky kept Darcy in his lap, her legs bracketing his waist and his arms like steel bands across her back, keeping her plastered against his broad, warm chest. His face was buried in her long, tangled hair and although she could not see his face she could tell by his uneven, heavy breathing that he was fighting to keep his emotions in check. She wanted to get back out there and continue fighting, but the comedown from the adrenaline rush of her escape left her shaky, and remembering the look on Bucky's face when he'd seen her, she said nothing. Instead she nestled herself in closer and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, soothingly running one hand through his hair, rubbing his back with the other.

“Shh, shhh,” she whispered in his ear, and felt the tremor run through him. “I wasn't even really that scared. I knew these guys wanted to make an exchange, heard 'em talking about it, which meant keeping me alive. It's okay, Bucky. I'm fine. And you know, right before they grabbed me, I'm almost positive I saw our girl Nessie popping her head up to check me out.”

She felt him laugh weakly against her shoulder, where his face was still hidden. 

“C'mon, baby. I'm okay. And I love you, just, so much. You know that? I do. Ooh boy, I've got it bad for you Bucky Barnes," she cooed. "You wanna know something else? Before you got here I actually winged a handful of those Ten Ring douchebags from up on that balcony. I think... I think I might be kind of good at this?”

He sighed, saying nothing, and still she could not see his expression. But she felt the bunched muscles in his shoulders relax slightly, and counted it as a microscopic victory.

҉

The Ten Rings was not a threat to be taken lightly, but a small rogue faction operating without instruction from the long-gone Mandarin was no match for Iron Man, Black Widow, Captain America, and Agent 13. While they fought Bruce combed through the group's databases, housed in the plain white building beside the lighthouse and Bucky remained sitting, entwined, with Darcy on the floor of the watch room, but even without them the group made quick work of the remaining terrorists. By the time they were finished restraining the roughly two dozen men who comprised the cell, Interpol and the Joint Terrorism Task Force had made it out to the remote northern island and were ready to collect their criminals.

It was Natasha who returned up the spiral staircase to the room where Bucky and Darcy still sat, glued together and rocking slightly. She could hear Darcy whispering silly reassuring jokes and nonsense endearments into the man's ear in an attempt to calm him. Although it seemed to be working, he still hadn't let her go.

She paused on the stairs to the rounded room, loathe to break up the moment when it was one her former mentor so clearly needed. Deciding to give them a few more minutes, she retraced her steps, lingering slightly below the room. She collapsed down onto the iron tread, the exhaustion and strain from the previous twelve hours rushing in all at once.

She rested her head against the brick wall, and sighed. She'd been loved like that a few times in her nefarious, blood-soaked career, and it had never ended well for her. Then again, most of the occasions in her life when a man had held her the way the man upstairs was holding his girlfriend had been based in deception, on her part or his or both. The only truly sincere love she'd held in her heart had been that first time in Brazil, with Timur. And that had gone up in flames with the walls of that hospital. She remembered it so clearly now, dredged up from her past with all the rest. The directive given to them had been simple: blow up a massive local hospital, patients and all, in the hopes of starting a wave of civil unrest and protests. 

But when the evening had come for them to don their nursing staff uniforms and sneak inside, the young, green agent had blinked. They'd slipped into the building easily, they'd wired the place from basement to roof and just as they were putting the finishing touches on their work...

Natasha swallowed back a heavy ache in her throat, her eyes blinking rapidly as she remembered how fast her heart had beat that night, how sick she'd felt. She'd gone every step of the way with Timur, but when the time had come to light the place up, he'd sensed her reluctance. Timur, older and more seasoned in the ways of killing, had taken pity on her and sent her away, telling her he'd finish the job and meet her back at their safehouse. She'd known, in that moment, how much he really loved her, and the kiss they'd shared before she fled the scene had been passionate, unmistakable.

And then the explosives, shoddily constructed by one of their KGB contacts in São Paolo, had detonated immediately instead of on a delay as planned. The resulting inferno had engulfed not only the hospital but three city blocks, and it had taken the lives of most of the people trapped within its raging, hellish flames. Including Timur.

The ensuing riots had rocked the city for two weeks. Her job finished for the time being, unrest successfully sowed, she'd scurried back to Moscow for her next mission. And although she'd continued as coolly competent and vicious as ever, deep down she'd known that something had been irreparably broken within her. Never again, in all the intervening years, had she let anyone in. The moment that hospital had exploded had scattered the remaining traces of any soft or compassionate sentiment she'd had; it had not been until a stubborn archer had decided, in a moment of good faith, to take a chance on her that she had allowed herself to feel anything more than fleeting, ephemeral moments of frustration or satisfaction. Cold and arachnid and deadly, just like her code name.

She wondered idly, as the cold from the metal stair seeped through the leather of her SHIELD uniform and a chill ran through her, if she'd have another chance at love like that again. She wondered if Bruce could be that chance. She pondered the risks, the rewards, the great swinging scales in her mind carefully weighing both before some thing, a small seed of a decision, settled itself in her gut. All at once, she felt warmer, and less drained than she had the moment before.

She'd called herself an Avenger, after all. She'd switched sides, she wanted to be one of the good guys, she no longer killed the way she had in those murky, lost decades following Timur's death. Why _not_ try for love again? Wasn't that part of what they were all working for? She'd told Loki that it was for children, and at the time she'd thought that every trace of her childhood spirit had been meticulously wrung from her body, leaving her incapable of the sentiment. But now, thinking about love and Bruce and Russia and her missing mother and her assassinated father and all of her teammates, she wasn't so sure.

From the base of the lighthouse, the dull peal of rubber-soled rain boots on wrought iron stairs resounded through the hollow tower. Someone, not particularly stealthy or fast, was making their way up the staircase and a few minutes later, Bruce appeared a few turns beneath her. The sight of him climbing towards her reaffirmed her decision: he looked wonderful, she thought, a little disheveled from the climb, his glasses slightly fogged, but flushed with excitement from their success. Natasha smiled, and reached for his hand which he thrust towards her gladly. His fingers were warm as they laced with hers, and she tugged him up the remaining stairs between them, leading his hand to rest on her back and tenderly lowering her forehead to rest on his.

"Need some physical comfort? Tony and I were just going through the database, you wouldn't believe some of the information these guys have on Stark Industries and AIM," he murmured, his warm, brown eyes so close and unblinking.

Could he see her, truly, for what she was? She felt like it, in that moment. So she took the only logical course of action: she grazed her lush mouth against his, darting her tongue out to brush his lower lip. He caught her, holding her carefully as he moved up and into the kiss. He was a decent kisser, not the most technically skilled she'd ever had, but there was a focus and sincerity to the way his tongue slid against hers, how lips pulled at her mouth, that made her pulse flutter. This was it, another choice she was making for no one else but herself, and the novelty of it was still thrilling.

She sighed into his mouth and he chuckled lightly, moving up a step and leaning into her as she relaxed against the wall. His fingers threaded themselves up into her jet black tresses, and she tilted her head slightly to a more comfortable angle. Natasha took in all of the sensory data: the cold brick at her back, Bruce's hardening arousal making itself known against her hip, the warm masculine smell of him, the hint of coffee still flavoring his mouth, the sight of him looking intoxicated when they finally came up for air. Neither of them were children, and they were not crossing this bridge together lightly. But the time was now, this place was as good as any other, and the man was Bruce. It felt right, and Natasha let out a slow exhale, filled with relief and gladness. He was smiling at her warmly and she returned it, before bobbing her head upwards, then turning and ascending the remaining stairs back to the watch room.

She could hear him following behind her and a coy smile tugged at her lips. Inside the round room, Bucky and Darcy were nowhere to be seen, so she moved outside to the gallery deck, where she found her agent in training cradled in the former assassin's lap, fast asleep. He was petting her hair, holding it as the wild northern winds tried to catch at it, and staring calmly out at the dim grey dawn. He nodded to her, and she nodded back, smiling crookedly as Bruce's head peeked out from the doorway and he stepped onto the balcony behind her. She felt his hand on her shoulder and turned to him, lacing her arm around his back and moving into his space.

Hope rushed in, as wild as the roaring sea beneath them and equally tenacious. She shifted her face to watch the sunrise with her friends. Below she could just make out Steve, Tony and Sharon debriefing the Interpol officers. Above, on the window's walk somewhere, she could hear a Herring Gull call out, its doleful cawing torn away by the cold gusts of air pulling at them. When the bird fell silent, she heard it tapping insistently at the glass window of the dark lantern room. Natasha set her jaw, ignoring the foreboding omen, and trained her eyes on the weak light beginning to illuminate the eastern horizon. There was still hope for her, she knew there was.


	6. septum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “As far back as I can remember myself—and I remember myself with lawless lucidity, I have been my own accomplice, who knows too much, and therefore is dangerous.”
> 
> ######  _Invitation to a Beheading_ , Vladimir Nabokov

#### Washington D.C.

Miss Lydia Smith, the USCIS officer assigned to her case, sat perched on the edge of her ergonomic office chair, absorbed in her study of the photos Natasha had systemically laid out across her wide steel desk while she told the story, or at least, _a_ story, of her life.

“It's, uh... wow, Miss Romanova. That's quite an, um... you're saying... this is you, and it's from... 1943?” the woman asked haltingly, holding up the red star-shaped badge of the Little Octobrists youth organization, a lacquered portrait of five-year-old Natalia embedded in its center. Her voice was steeped in disbelief and her mouth was twisted in a grimace. “Ma'am, that's just...”

“Impossible?” Natasha asked tartly, one perfect eyebrow lifted. “For me to be so old? Like Steve Rogers, or James Barnes?”

“Well, that's different. They're known recipients of Dr. Erskine's and his followers' experiments. It's well-known that the serum those men received had side-effects that include an altered aging and healing process. But those are special cases.”

“Miss Smith, if I could offer you any advice during this meeting, I think it would be that you need to broaden your horizons. What one scientist achieves can be replicated elsewhere. The atomic bomb, exploration of space, gamma radiation, cloning, genetically modified food... genetically modified humans, even. It doesn't matter the discovery. Generally speaking, once people form some idea of what's possible, anyone with enough brain cells can recreate the correct conditions for finding it themselves. Whether it's successful or not will depend largely on the accuracy of the recreation. I should know,” Bruce said scathingly, leaning forward in his chair and peering over his glasses at the woman. He looked a little winded once he'd finished his tirade, and his eyes were flashing a dangerous green, so Natasha slid her hand over his, tangling their fingers.

“The thing is, I can't grant you asylum from a state that no longer exists,” the officer mumbled, clearly chastened by Bruce's outburst.

Natasha sighed. “Lydia, if I can call you that? You seem like a nice person. And maybe you didn't study my history, the information that was released to the general public during the SHIELD leak, before I walked into your office today. So I'll just remind you, in case you've forgotten... I worked as an agent for probably a decade or so after the fall of the Iron Curtain. That work I did, the person I was, that was started during my days in the Red Room, beginning in the Autumn of 1944. And while I _did_ work for the KGB, as well as other agencies within the Soviet Union, I _also_ worked for their successors once we returned to being simply... 'Russia.' So I'm asking for American citizenship, and asylum, from all of it. Do you understand?”

Lydia looked back at the photos across her desk: young Natalia in her black and white kindergarten school photo, a newspaper clipping with a picture of her family that was written after one of her father's wartime engineering feats, a V-E day parade where she could be seen waving a miniature soviet flag, her birth certificates, her marriage licenses. It told a long, sad story. That story couldn't really hurt Natasha anymore, but she hoped it might tug at the heartstrings of this woman enough to inspire clemency.

The officer sighed tiredly. “I can't promise you anything. US Citizenship and Immigration Services have extremely strict rules, and your case is... exceptional. I'll review your paperwork, and discuss your case with my supervisors. I should be able to tell you one way or another in a couple weeks.”

“And in the meantime?” Bruce prompted.

Natasha spotted at once the woman's moment of indecision, her misgiving. “I was never here,” she offered, “I'm not even in the country, and this meeting definitely did not occur.”

The officer nodded, clearly relieved, and stood abruptly. "That's probably for the best." She thrust her hand out for the pair to shake and then made her excuses about a busy afternoon, hurrying them out of the office.

When they'd left, the unassuming woman sank back into her seat with an anguished groan. A soviet Mata Hari turned SHIELD agent asking for American asylum and citizenship. What strange times they were living in, Lydia reflected. Her next thought, unsurprisingly, was to wonder how the hell she was going to sell her supervisors on this.

҉

The Casta Diva aria, as performed by the legendary Maria Callas, was not exactly conducive to a routine ballet practice. But halfway through their second of bottle of wine, holed up in an excessively tasteful hotel room at the D.C. Hilton, Bruce managed to cajole Natasha into showing him some of her skills. She generally preferred to dance in silence, or to one of the Russians masters, Prokofiev or Mussorgsky. However, they'd been discussing the opera to which the aria belonged, _Norma _, due to the calming effect it had on Bruce, along with other techniques he used to regulate his heart rate. Natasha had insisted that she wanted to hear this piece of music that could bring him back from the edge.__

____

It was truly a spectacular solo, she marveled, even playing on the tinny speakers of Bruce's old phone. Callas's world-class voice climbed, swooped, and glided through the scales and shifting emotions of the piece with technical precision and soulful longing. Natasha was no great opera fan; still, she couldn't help but feel disarmed by watching Bruce, in just his simple white cotton undershirt and suit trousers, sink into the luxe bedding as he listened. He looked completely at peace, and she envied him, just a little. So when he asked her to share, in turn, something she used to soothe her nerves, she confided in him about the years of formal training she'd endured in the Red Room (while undergoing other training as well, of course) and the three years she'd spent undercover with the Bolshoi Ballet.

____

How she still danced sometimes, the use of her muscle memory as she propelled herself gracefully across the room like a double-edged knife, heartening and hurting her at the same time.

____

“Stand up, right here,” she directed, tugging him towards the free floor space in the center of the room. “You're going to be my barre.” She smirked at him, a little more flirtatiously than she intended, and he huffed with pride.

____

“Any time,” he offered, a goofy grin lighting up his face.

____

Natasha perched a hand on his shoulder, took a deep breath, and began a series of informal attitudes, then arabesques, the wine and the relaxed atmosphere of the moment making her movements loose and imprecise, one hand grasping onto Bruce's firm shoulder for support. He was staring at her turtleneck-clad torso, twisting to remain vertical even as her legs lifted and fell, the leggings she'd donned after they returned from the meeting revealing to Bruce the shifting bunching of her well-toned muscles. She stepped in front of him, moving one of his hands to her back as she began a series of pas de valse, moving in small turns as her feet alternated between supporting her and extending slightly to tap the floor in front of her. She danced around him and he rotated to follow her, both of his hands cupping her rib cage, lightly drifting across the fabric of her shirt as she danced circles within them.

____

By the last turn, she noticed that Bruce's fingertips were doing more than simply drifting, more than just following, he was slowing her down as his hands attempted to find a resting place on her body. Ah, she thought. So. Here we are.

____

She ceased mid-tap, pausing to stand in front of him again, and leaned towards his body. He instinctively moved closer, his hands finally able to clutch her the way he'd been trying to. After a moment of enjoying his embrace, their lips chastely touching, she broke it off with a light chuckle, murmuring, “No telling Tony about the ballerina thing. I know he could find that dirt if he wanted to, but so far he's been blessedly incurious about my past. Something tells me if he knew I danced professionally... I'd never hear the end it.”

____

“These lips? They're sealed,” Bruce joked, shifting his legs so that one slid between her own, his calf rubbing hers. “Well, mostly sealed. Unless you decide you, uh, need them for anything.” Natasha knew then where the evening was headed, finally on firm footing with him, so she took a step back. When he advanced, she took another, until she felt the foot of the bed against the back of her knees.

____

“Bruce,” she started, her hands sneaking up under the back of his t-shirt, “Is this... something...”

____

“You're asking if I can handle sex without a code green?” he supplied, jabbing his fingers through his hair. She nodded. “Normally, uh, yeah. Yes. I can. I've gotten my control to a point where... uh, I can. With you though, Tasha...” he trailed off, his eyes zeroing in on her still brightly painted red lips.

____

Those lips quirked a little, a slight smile playing across them, and she whispered, “I'll go easy on you. Take off your shirt, and your pants.” He shucked the garments hastily. 

____

“Now take off mine.”

____

He took his time with that directive, his hands following the study his eyes were making of her lithe, muscular legs, her small waist, her tense, flat stomach, her generous, teardrop-shaped breasts. The sight of his dexterous hands running over her tender, pale skin had her breathing heavily and turning them, so with a feather light push against his furry chest, Bruce fell back onto the bed. Natasha followed, crawling up his body and swinging a leg over his waist, her mouth gravitating back towards his.

____

When she withdrew, she bit her lip as she glanced down at the bulge in his boxers, swiveling her hips to grind against it, only two thin scraps of underwear separating them. His lips were smeared red by her lipstick. She liked that visual, and committed it to memory. “How do you want me, Bruce?” she asked, her voice sounding deeper and huskier than usual. She didn't bother to pretend this wasn't affecting her, there was no need for subterfuge here with this man. She could feel the heat prickling along her skin, and her underwear was undeniably damp.

____

He hummed at the feeling of that damp heat against him, closing his eyes and letting his head fall back against the mattress.

____

“I think you should take the reins, Tasha,” he muttered, thrusting up against her slightly.

____

“How about,” she breathed, while raining fleeting kisses against his neck, then his shoulders, rocking her hips again just to hear his sharp intake of breath, “I show you what I like, and after that, you return the favor?”

____

“Ah, the testing stage. Considering how long we've spent on hypothesis and prediction...” he panted, his hand reaching down to gather her inky black hair behind her head as she pulled his boxers off and sank her mouth onto his straining, leaking member, forming a tight seal around the head while she took the rest of him in hand. In the background, Maria Callas continued to soar from note to note, pleading for peace and caution.

____

“It's the logical next step,” he gasped, and Natasha glanced up at him through her dark eyelashes, winking as she hummed her agreement.

____

There was only a smattering of discussion after that, as they both found their bodies more than able to do the communicating for them.

҉

#### Cohoes, New York, somewhere along NY-470

____

Ultron came, Ultron saw, Ultron did not conquer.

____

But he did sow the seeds of discord, and his agents, the Red Witch in particular, widened the cracks that had threatened to splinter the Avengers team from day one.

____

They were together, just barely, by the time the capital city of Sokovia fell back to Earth and the Vision eliminated the last of Ultron's consciousness in a forest far from the destroyed mountain of rubble that was once Novi Grad.

____

But Bruce?

____

Natasha had taken to wondering if she'd gotten her just desserts, finally admitting to him how much she cared about him only to throw him off his guard, push him off the ledge and let the other guy out. Machinating and practical to a fault, to the very blood-soaked end. It was like it had been inexorably written into her very genetic information, and she could no longer stop herself from operating like an agent. Not even with Bruce. The man, perhaps, might have been inclined to choose Natasha over self-imposed exile, even after the damage he'd caused. If only the Hulk had not wrestled control of their shared physical being, breaking the fragile detente they'd forged. The Hulk, who did not look at her with the same respect and hesitant adoration. She was capable of talking to the other guy, of soothing him even (the lullaby they'd made together breaching his defenses even in his wildest rages), they still didn't have the connection that she'd made with Bruce. And she was still afraid of him, if she was being honest.

____

So she implored him to turn off the cloaking mechanism of the Quinjet he'd been flying, asked him to come back to her, and he'd chosen to ignore that. He'd given her the chance to run with him, she'd given him a chance to run with her, and they'd both blinked.

____

It was just that, when the moment had come to walk away from it all, Natasha had thought of all the wrongs she'd done, all the lives she'd taken. And she hadn't felt worthy of rest. And... she liked playing the hero. She'd played the other side for so long, a life full of lies and blood and numb nothingness; she knew running away with Bruce wouldn't have been returning to her old ways, and yet she also _knew_ that leaving the Avengers would be taking a step backwards, moving in the wrong direction.

____

Still, for all his justified reasons for leaving... the hurt ran deep. Natasha knew of only one way to deal with that kind of wounded pride and loss: she threw herself into helping Tony establish his new Avengers base of operation in upstate New York. What other choice did she have? She couldn't follow Bruce, even if she thought she might be able to swallow her pride and beg him to come back. He had not given her that option, had left no sign of where he was going. No one could find him. Lost to her, like her parents and Timur and Dreykov's daughter and Madame B. Another link in her chain of secrets, another red note in her ledger, another chink in her armor.

____

But she had been granted asylum from the American government, so she had a home, at least. She suspected their motives were as much inspired by her record of do-gooding for SHIELD as their desire to keep her close, where they could watch her. It hardly mattered to Natasha. She'd disappear if she needed to, but for the time being, visibility was working just fine for her. She'd gone to a nice stylist in Manhattan, on Pepper's recommendation, and had her hair dyed to a slightly brighter shade of crimson than her natural color. Why hide anything, anymore? What did she have left that hadn't been aired to the public like dirty laundry, hadn't been thrown back in her face? If she was going to be visible, and judged, let it be for who she truly was.

____

And she still had her patience. She could wait, for now. For a sign, for a word from Bruce, for some kind of indication that she'd truly chosen wisely or poorly. Waiting was far from her favorite way to pass the time, but she was undeniably good at it, and she really did adore the man, so wait she would.

____

She'd taken to joyriding in Tony's cars, sometimes, on the weekend. He'd scolded her for it the first time, unctuously insisting that she should have brought him along. She'd winked and smirked, and he'd laughed knowingly; they'd left it there, a tacit agreement between them not to speak of the pain they were both ignoring after finding themselves on shaky, uncertain terms with the people they'd chosen to love.

____

She worked hard during the week, training the new recruits alongside Steve, Sharon and Bucky, so she figured granting herself the freedom of Sunday morning drives along the endlessly branching highways running through the fallow, deadened farmland of upstate was not so great a sin. She'd received a few speeding tickets, but she'd talked her way out of more. It wasn't exactly excitement, but it passed the hours and at times, it was almost like fun. She even occasionally managed to forgot how unhappy she was.

____

It was in mid-January that she downshifted gears in Tony's Tesla Roadster, crossing the Mohawk River and entering the sleepy little town of Cohoes, New York. She'd passed through the town before, a name and an address she'd discovered during some after-hours research having brought her back to this place again and again. She'd never stayed though, never gotten any further than just a drive-by inspection. In the center of town was an Orthodox church, pale yellow brick with three imposing blue onion-domed towers atop the entrance. Its bells were clanging continuously, and with a jolt, she remembered.

____

January 14th, the Old New Year. The Julian New Year. Sighing, she pulled the Roadster into a curbside parking space, and got out. She'd never quite been able to force herself to linger before, but today, the first of the orthodox year, felt like the right moment. After all, she'd woken with an itchy right eye that morning and she'd accidentally put her shirt on backwards in her dimly lit bedroom, only realizing she'd done it as she was opening the door to leave her apartment in Stark Tower. Good omens, she thought. Cohoes had been dusted with about a half inch of snow the night before, and it glittered, pristine and not yet trampled or muddied, in the brilliant winter morning sunshine.

____

Natasha hadn't been raised with religion, it would have been a crime against the state and unacceptable for an upstanding member of the party like her father to have allowed that. But Pasha had never fully relinquished his own Orthodox upbringing either, instilled in him back before the Bolsheviks and the Red October and all the rest of it that had come to pass. He'd mentioned the Bible in passing to Natasha, never willfully educating her but never completely shielding her from it. Often he'd spoken wistfully about the Divine Liturgy, how he missed the ritual of it: staring for hours at the golden icons posted around his village's old, drafty church, the strong, smoky incense thickening the air to a soup, the droning intonation of the patriarch's chanted sermons, the hazy glow of the many candles held by the softly swaying congregation as they hummed along, the feeling of absolution that followed making the sign of the cross at the end of the service.

____

Absolution, Natasha mused, was in short supply these days. She locked the car, and made her way through the soft white snow, climbing the stairs carefully up towards the church door. The large bell continued to toll out in celebration, and inside there were smaller bells that chimed along in a strangely discordant harmony to its deep, sonorous knell.

____

Natasha stole a glimpse of the church name on her way in. It was dedicated to Saint Nicholas, the wonderworker, patron to repentant thieves, among others. The interior's painted white walls were covered with framed, gilded portraits in the classical Orthodox style of the holy trinity and other saints. The smell of incense, spicy and cloying, was already hanging densely in the air. It was strange to her, not a part of her Russian childhood, and yet, the handful of people inside were speaking an American-accented Russian that felt just a little bit familiar, so she discreetly folded herself into a pew at the back of the church, and let out another deep sigh.

____

It was hardly enough, but at least it was something.

҉

Six weeks on, the late-February weather was atrocious and not at all conducive to long drives, yet still she found herself making the trek to the back of sleepy St. Nicholas Church every Sunday, humming along to the Old Slavonic chants but still keeping her distance from the other attendants. She didn't think there were any answers in the protracted, ritualistic services, but she couldn't deny the comfort that coming here gave her.

____

Comfort, another post-Ultron element of life that was in short supply. Her life consisted mostly of a bruising, exhaustive training regiment set by Steve, her empty bed, and the quiet, minimalist office Tony had set up for her in the compound, where she spent hours staring at the blank walls, pondering what could have been. There was the random girls' night with Darcy and Sharon, sometimes they even convinced Wanda to leave her bedroom and join them. Idle flirtations with Tony. She'd given therapy a shot, meeting up with Bucky's counselor, Sam Wilson, once or twice. And of course, her Sunday drives.

____

Natasha was just preparing to make her usual circumspect exit as the service was coming to a close, the small expatriate Russian community standing and casually shaking hands, gossiping, lingering a little while longer in their weekly kinship before making the cold trek back to their lonely homes, when she felt a sharp jabbing in the back of her shoulder. Surprised, she turned to see a shrunken, seventy-something-year-old woman peering up at her through thick glasses.

____

In an undulating accent that was somehow both Brooklyn and Stalingrad, she warbled out in creaky Russian, “Hello, milaya. Aren't you looking for me? You're really going to leave without saying hello, _again_?”

____

Natasha shook her head in a silent 'no', not at all prepared for the question or this encounter. The woman smiled warmly, the expression softening her lined, weathered face and revealing a mouth full of graying teeth. “You've been coming for weeks now, but you don't live in this town. In fact, we all know who you are.” Her sympathetic smile remained, and when Natasha's eyes flitted to the rest of the congregation, she saw that many of them were covertly watching the interaction.

____

“I'm not as sneaky as I thought I was, I guess,” she murmured wistfully, smiling down at the white-haired and neatly-dressed old woman.

____

“No, milaya, you're not. But I'm glad you've come, all the same. You'll join me for tea?”

____

Natasha hesitated for a fraction of a second, then nodded her head, and let out a small, surprised laugh when the woman, belying her appearances, vigorously linked her arm through Natasha's, pulling her out of the church and down the slipper front steps. They marched down the block to an assuming apartment building. She led her to a small unit on the ground floor, switching her shoes for slippers and handing a pair to Natasha, then tugged on her sleeve to lead her through a living room dominated by plastic-covered couches and doilies, into a sea-foam green, Formica-covered kitchen.

____

She gestured to one of the simple steel chairs around her small square table before filling a kettle with water and lighting a burner, then sat across the table from Natasha. Natasha discreetly took in the retro furnishings while the woman worked, noting the photos of several families on the wall who all looked vaguely related to the woman. Descendants, perhaps.

____

“Shall we speak in Russian, or in English?” the elderly woman asked.

____

“I prefer English these days, if you don't mind,” Natasha answered mildly.

____

“Not at all. Do _you_ mind if I smoke?” she responded calmly in accented English, even as she was pulling out a slim cigarette from her pack. Natasha smiled, shaking her head, and the woman pulled off the royal purple kerchief she'd been wearing, along with her heavy parka, revealing a simple black dress underneath.

____

“What's your name?” Natasha asked, breaking the long silence, “Since you already know mine, I think.” The elderly woman had been enjoying her cigarette while she studied Natasha, and startled slightly at the question, 

____

“I do,” the woman said, her green eyes glittering playfully. “And it is quite an extraordinary coincidence, I think, that you seemed to have become a secret congregant of my church these past few weeks. In any case, my name is Alexandra Alianovna.”

____

“What a lovely name,” Natasha said softly, her heart racing.

____

“I was named for my father,” Alexandra responded, giving Natasha a meaningful glance, at which the redhead exhaled, feeling a bit shaky. “My mother, Helena, never quite recovered from the grief of losing him, back in Stalingrad. He went missing not long after World War II. He and my mother lived in the city, he was a prominent engineer. She often speculated that he'd been sent to a Siberian gulag, or made a political prisoner, or something of the like, but... to tell the truth, we never knew for certain. She married again in 1947, in Brooklyn. Anyway, I don't suppose it matters now.”

____

“No.” Natasha's voice was hushed, thoughtful. “I don't suppose it does.”

____

“And yet... I've always been one who prefers having the answers to my questions, even when they're difficult to hear. Or perhaps long overdue,” the woman mused, mashing her cigarette into an etched glass ashtray and rising to pull the hissing kettle from the stove. “Black tea alright?”

____

“Fine,” Natasha breathed. “And... your mother, Helena? She left... Stalingrad... for good?”

____

“Yes, she did. She knew she was pregnant, with me, and she felt she was in danger. She had some family who were able to help her flee the country on very short notice, build a new identity for herself in New York. Brighton Beach, to be exact. But she left someone very important behind, someone who went missing on the very day she was supposed to leave Stalingrad, and do you know? I don't think she ever forgave herself for that. All she had was her hope that her daughter would be safe, with her husband... imagine her anguish when she found out her husband had gone missing as well. She never got her answers, about her daughter or her husband.”

____

Natasha swallowed heavily as she watched the woman prepare and pour the tea into two delicate china teacups, in exactly the same way that her mother once had. “I can understand how she must have felt. I'm always grateful to get my answers as well, even the painful ones,” she said, as Alexandra placed a cup in front of her, then reached for a tin from one of the cabinets. “My father worked for the government, after the war. He was... he was killed, because he would not join an illicit espionage agency.”

____

Alexandra was struck dumb, horror splashed across her pale, wrinkled face. “How... terrible...” she said at last, sinking into her chair. “I would not have wished that for him, or you. And... your mother?”

____

Natasha arched an eyebrow at the woman, and they both smiled shyly, knowingly, at each other. "She went missing, on the same day that he did. A terrible coincidence, perhaps," she said after a heavy pause.

____

The older woman blinked rapidly. “I'm sure... if... your... mother had known, what the world knows now, what happened to you,” she paused, bracing herself, her smile faltering slightly, “...what they did to you, Natalia Alianovna Romanova, she would have torn apart the gates of hell with her bare hands to get you back.”

____

“I...” Natasha started, and found herself suddenly adrift in her own sorrow. “I... it's a nice thought. Comforting.”

____

“The truth. Have a cookie, milaya, you're thin as a rail,” Alexandra said sharply.

____

“May I ask when you were born, if it's not too inappropriate?” Natasha asked, shifting the conversation.

____

“Ah, so you do understand. Molodets! The spring of 1945. Tilyets, the stubborn bull. We Tauruses are well-known for our persistence and sentimentality. And you? My grandson helped me find your file after that business with the SHIELD. On the, eh, internet. He told me that you're twenty-eight, and that you were born in September 1984. But I think that's nonsense... isn't it?”

____

“November 1938... I'm right on the edge between Skarpion and Strilyets, I think,” Natasha murmured.

____

“Hmmm,” Alexandra hummed, stirring two spoonfuls of sugar into her tea and nudging the tin of shortbread cookies closer towards Natasha, “I think... the world sees you as a Scorpius, don't they? But you're secretly something of a Sagittarius, with your long life of misadventures and your nimble mind. Yes. A secret Sagittarius, if ever I've seen one. But Natashenka, I'm not so easily distracted from my point.”

____

She shook her head. “I already understand your point very well, sestrichka.”

____

Alexandra gave her another full smile at that, her eyes crinkling with delight. “Good. I've been an only child all my life and although it's been a very good life, I can't tell you how happy I am to finally meet you. You will come every week, won't you? Come to church with me, or just come for lunch? Perhaps join my children and grandchildren and me for Easter?”

____

Natasha hesitated again. “I... I don't know if I have the kind of life that lends itself to weekly visits, Sashenka.”

____

“Then come when you can,” the woman bleated out plaintively, in that moment sounding somehow very much her senior and also like a petulant younger sibling. “And call, when you can't. Khorosheye sestrichestvo - luchsheye bogatstvo.”

____

“Good sisterhood is the best sisterhood,” Natasha intoned faintly, her eyes sinking closed. “But that's not how the saying goes.”

____

“Isn't it still true, though?” Alexandra asked, her frail voice wobbling slightly as tears began to gather in her eyes. “I finally have you here, where you belong. Promise me you'll come again, and we can put our sad past behind us. Together. Pozhaluysta, please, sestrichka.”

____

“Alright,” Natasha said, picking up one of the buttery cookies and munching on it. She took a sip of the strong black tea, and found it was just like her mother used to make it. The old Russian Caravan blend, she remembered, had always been a little smokey, a little bitter, but mostly it just tasted like home, like love, like absolution. She smiled at the woman. “I'll come when I can.”

____

Alexandra smiled back at her, eyes shining, and reached into the tin to place another cookie in her hand.

____

It was enough.

____

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> H/T to hurd, who left a comment about how Natasha probably needs an old Russian grandma to offer her some solace. I already had kind of an idea about Natasha finding a descendant after Bruce ducks out but when I read that suggestion I thought, oh yeah, of course, that's perfect. Thanks hurd! 
> 
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> Throughout this fic Natasha is seeing all these bad signs, and she's thinking a lot about love in one way [romantically, with Bruce], but the truth is that there are a few different kinds of love being offered to her, if she can find it within herself to accept them. I don't really like horribly sad endings but I am a big fan of the bittersweet, which I hope the loss of Bruce and discovery of a long-lost sister achieves.
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> Anyway, as always, thanks for reading! ♥


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